Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissesar told the Trinidad Guardian on Friday her 10-day trip to New York presented an opportunity to explore several areas to diversify the economy of Trinidad and Tobago.She told the paper there will be “tremendous benefits” from the trip.
“We dealt specifically with trade and investment and the tourism thrust," she told the paper in an interview in new York.
"We are very conscious that we cannot continue to put all our eggs in the energy basket," she said, noting that energy is a depleting resource and the government must diversify the economy.
“We can do that by seeking foreign investment, we can do that by encouraging tourism—whether it be leisure tourism, eco-tourism, business tourism, those are some of the areas we have been exploring in keeping with what we saw as the thrust that we must take our economy into.
“So, I am seeing benefits for T&T. Of course, there could be more and could be less. But I believe there are tremendous benefits from the meetings we have been having,” she added.
She said a meeting on Thursday with the disaster preparedness consultants, James Lee Witt Associates, could provide the Government with better ideas on how to deal with the perennial flood problem affecting the country.
The company was involved with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and has been part of disaster relief efforts related to several hurricanes, including Katrina, which devastated New Orleans. It is involved in the clean up of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and in earthquake relief in Haiti.
During the meeting, Lee Witt proposed to several recommendations to deal with disasters. The Prime Minister promised to review them on her return home.
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