Go out and earn your earn your own for­eign ex­change.

This was the mes­sage from for­mer pres­i­dent of the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA) Roger Roach to busi­ness­es, who are cry­ing out for for­eign ex­change.

Roach, founder and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Lazuri Ap­par­el Ltd, who served a two-year tenure at the helm of the man­u­fac­tur­ers’ body, made the com­ments to the Busi­ness Guardian in an ex­it in­ter­view at the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s head of­fice in Barataria on Mon­day.

Ac­knowl­edg­ing that T&T con­tin­ues to bat­tle a for­eign ex­change crunch, which af­fects all sec­tors of the so­ci­ety, Roach ad­vised busi­ness­es not to sim­ply sit idly by and com­plain.
“We are telling our mem­bers to go out and earn your own for­eign ex­change so that you don’t end up in this sit­u­a­tion. You have good prod­ucts, in­no­v­a­tive prod­ucts, qual­i­ty prod­ucts, prod­ucts that have demon­strat­ed a to­tal ac­cep­tance by the Cari­com mar­ket since, in most cas­es, the bal­ance of trade is in Trinidad’s favour.

“We have a large di­as­po­ra in mar­kets like the UK, the Unit­ed States, Cana­da, and so on. Ex­port those prod­ucts to those mar­kets, earn your own for­eign ex­change so that our mem­bers are not in the po­si­tion where we de­pend to­tal­ly on com­mer­cial banks and that al­so ap­plies to ser­vices. If you have ser­vices, whether it’s ac­count­ing ser­vice, lo­gis­ti­cal ser­vices, oth­er ser­vices, try to get to a point where you’re de­ploy­ing your ser­vices out­side of Trinidad and To­ba­go so that in your busi­ness mod­el you can earn for­eign ex­change,” Roach ex­plained.

Stat­ing that the TTMA re­mains “very con­cerned” about the over­all sup­ply of for­eign ex­change, Roach likened smooth avail­abil­i­ty of forex to “a high tide which floats all boats,” stat­ing that when all as­pects of the econ­o­my are func­tion­ing prop­er­ly, every­one ben­e­fits.

He com­mend­ed Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young for meet­ing re­cent­ly with rel­e­vant stake­hold­ers to chart a way for­ward.

“We’re ea­ger to see what comes out of these talks so that the or­di­nary per­son es­pe­cial­ly has eas­i­er ac­cess to for­eign ex­change, es­pe­cial­ly peo­ple who have chil­dren study­ing abroad, per­sons who are on va­ca­tions and per­sons who es­pe­cial­ly want to trav­el for med­ical rea­sons,” Roach said.

How­ev­er, he ad­vised that a holis­tic so­lu­tion re­quires a pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship in terms of look­ing at the al­lo­ca­tion of ex­change, but al­so a deep­er un­der­stand­ing of the busi­ness mod­el and what T&T needs to fo­cus on as a coun­try to de­ter­mine where the lim­it­ed sup­ply of for­eign ex­change is best de­ployed.

On claims that it is most­ly the “big com­pa­nies” that con­tin­ue to eat up a large per­cent­age of this coun­try’s for­eign ex­change, Roach said from “an ag­gre­gate point of view,” those who utilise the most for­eign ex­change are ones with the most goods to buy.

“If you have a larg­er busi­ness you will utilise more for­eign ex­change. But the flip side of that the largest busi­ness­es in our mem­ber­ship earn the most for­eign ex­change. So if we were to look at the top 40 ex­porters, you will find that a num­ber of our ex­porters are ex­port­ing in ex­cess of 60 per cent of their ca­pac­i­ty,” Roach said.

He said what needs to hap­pen in some cas­es, es­pe­cial­ly for the busi­ness­es earn­ing a lot of for­eign ex­change, is to find a way to “un­lock” the sup­ply of that for­eign ex­change and have it de­ployed in­to the sys­tem.

“There is for­eign ex­change in the bank that is not un­locked in­to the sys­tem...The oth­er thing that we have to look at is the busi­ness mod­els where some busi­ness­es earn no hard cur­ren­cy to con­tribute to the sys­tem but they utilise a lot of for­eign ex­change,” Roach added.

On what the on­go­ing glob­al trade wars, es­pe­cial­ly the tar­iffs im­posed by the US on ma­jor trad­ing coun­tries like Chi­na, could mean for Caribbean coun­tries, Roach said the re­gion runs the risk of be­com­ing”col­lat­er­al dam­age.”

“The tar­iffs im­posed on Chi­nese prod­ucts en­ter­ing the Unit­ed States may not af­fect busi­ness­es in T&T, who are im­port­ing full con­tain­er loads di­rect from Chi­na, es­pe­cial­ly if those ships do not pass through the US and maybe use Ja­maica or Pana­ma as the trans­ship­ment point. The tar­iffs on Chi­nese goods may not at­tract high­er prices.

“For busi­ness­es that are buy­ing prod­ucts that first en­ter the Unit­ed States, then are con­sol­i­dat­ed with oth­er prod­ucts to be shipped to T&T, those prod­ucts, be­cause of the high­er tar­iffs on Chi­nese goods will be more ex­pen­sive,” Roach said.

How­ev­er, he sug­gest­ed that has to be looked at care­ful­ly be­cause one has to al­so fac­tor that these goods may be en­tered in­to bond­ed fa­cil­i­ties with on­ward ship­ment that may not at­tract du­ties.

Roach said this is some­thing the TTMA con­tin­ues to mon­i­tor as it af­fects every­one.

Over the past two years, the TTMA has re­mained stead­fast in its com­mit­ment to ad­vanc­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, fos­ter­ing in­no­va­tion and cre­at­ing new op­por­tu­ni­ties for busi­ness­es across the re­gion.

Dur­ing that time, the TTMA went on 12 trade mis­sions with 251 com­pa­nies, gen­er­at­ing ini­tial ex­ports of 62 con­tain­ers with­in the first six months of each mis­sion.

“For ex­am­ple, we would have vis­it­ed Suri­name, Guyana, Ja­maica, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Be­lize, the Ba­hamas, St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, An­tigua and Bar­bu­da. These are re­gion­al mar­kets that when we take a busi­ness, let’s say a small busi­ness, to some of these mar­kets, even though the busi­ness may have ex­port­ed be­fore, some mar­kets would have been new to that busi­ness,” Roach said.

In March 2024, the TTMA al­so host­ed its first ex­tra-re­gion­al trade mis­sion to Ghana.

In giv­ing a per­spec­tive on the im­pe­tus be­hind the trade mis­sions, Roach said, “Back in 2020, we set our­selves a goal to dou­ble man­u­fac­tur­ing ex­ports in five years by 2025. At the time, when we dis­ag­gre­gate the fig­ures, take away all the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal prod­ucts or man­u­fac­tur­ing prod­ucts for core non-en­er­gy man­u­fac­tur­ing, which is food and bev­er­age, chem­i­cals, wood prod­ucts, fab­rics, print­ing and pack­ag­ing, etc, stood at about $3.3 bil­lion.

“We set a goal to dou­ble it by 2025. And as at the end of 2024, our core ex­ports in that area stood at $6.2 bil­lion, which means that we are on tar­get to achieve that goal in 2025 and we ex­pect that we’ll not on­ly achieve it, but ex­ceed it.”

Port woes at the port of Port-of-Spain re­main un­ten­able.

Roach em­pha­sised there needs to be a way for the Gov­ern­ment, the port work­ers and the pri­vate sec­tor to work to­geth­er to solve this is­sue.

Us­ing his own per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ence Roach said, “I im­port­ed some raw ma­te­ri­als from Ghana. It got here with­in a week but I got an ap­point­ment sev­en days lat­er to clear it. So it took me a short­er time to get it from Africa to here than it took me to clear it at one of our ports.”

In 2022, Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan said a Re­quest for Pro­pos­als (RFP) seek­ing a pri­vate in­vestor for the Port Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (PATT) would be is­sued.

Port Au­thor­i­ty chair­man Lyle Alexan­der, al­so in 2022, said that a suc­cess­ful part­ner at the PATT)could bring in up to US$200 mil­lion.

He made the re­marks while speak­ing at the vir­tu­al launch of the port of Port-of-Spain Pub­lic-Pri­vate Part­ner­ship Struc­tur­ing Process, which was done in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Gov­ern­ment’s ad­vi­sor on the PPP Process, the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB).

The Busi­ness Guardian reached out to Alexan­der on Tues­day for an up­date on the RFP.

He said a pro­pos­al from an in­ter­na­tion­al en­ti­ty was re­ceived on the clos­ing day which was April 6, 2025.

“We ex­pect the eval­u­a­tion process to be­gin on Thurs­day and with­in a short time we will have a de­ci­sion we could make go­ing for­ward for a po­ten­tial in­vestor for the port,” Alexan­der said.

Pressed whether it was a US or UK com­pa­ny which made the pro­pos­al, Alexan­der said he pre­ferred not to say adding that “most of these com­pa­nies are tied with peo­ple from all over the world.”

Roach came on the TTMA board back in 2013.

He left in 2017, and re­joined the board in 2020 and for the last five years he has been on the board, cul­mi­nat­ing in his ser­vice as pres­i­dent.

He de­scribed his tenure as one of growth, de­vel­op­ment, in­no­va­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty.

“And that has af­ford­ed me a lot of op­por­tu­ni­ties to serve the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor and the coun­try,” Roach said adding, “I serve on a num­ber of dif­fer­ent state boards and it’s re­al­ly to get back in­to my pri­vate busi­ness and to make sure that it’s sus­tain­able. And that’s ba­si­cal­ly what I have in the im­me­di­ate fu­ture. No big, grandiose plans,” he said.