As Trinidad and Tobago’s Finance Minister Davendranath Tancoo prepares to deliver the new national budget to Parliament, Kiran Singh, president of the Greater San Fernando Area Chamber of Commerce (GSFCC), is pushing for concrete action instead of decades of rhetorical promises around economic diversification. Singh is calling on the national government to allocate targeted funding to local enterprises, with the explicit goal of building a production-focused, export-driven economy that can reduce the country’s historic overreliance on energy and consumption-led growth.
In an interview with the *Express* on the eve of the budget presentation, Singh emphasized that the time for talk about economic restructuring has passed. Against a backdrop of the International Monetary Fund’s forecast of modest near-term growth for T&T, paired with mounting fiscal pressures and widespread calls for urgent structural reform, Singh argues that deliberate public investment in diversification is no longer optional.
Singh outlined a clear roadmap for targeted investment, highlighting a portfolio of high-potential sectors that he says can position T&T as a competitive player on the global market. Among these are agriculture and agro-processing, cocoa development, maritime services, tourism, financial and professional services, information and communications technology (ICT), and manufacturing. A core priority for Singh is shifting the focus from serving only the domestic market to building scalable local companies that generate critical foreign exchange for the country.
A key centerpiece of his proposal is the full revival of T&T’s cocoa industry. Singh called for holistic investment across the entire cocoa value chain, from rehabilitating aging estates and training smallholder farmers to integrating modern technology and building domestic processing infrastructure. Rather than continuing the current model of exporting unprocessed raw cocoa beans, he argues T&T should build a global brand for premium Trinidadian chocolate and capture the full economic value of the crop.
Singh also put forward a comprehensive national maritime strategy that spans ship repair, bunkering services, transhipment operations, warehousing, offshore energy support services, and seafood processing. By upgrading core infrastructure including ports, dry docks, and cold-storage networks, he says T&T can claim its position as the leading logistics hub for the southern Caribbean.
Preparing the national workforce for the digital age is another non-negotiable budget priority, according to Singh. He called for sustained investment in education and training for high-demand digital fields including data science, cybersecurity, cloud computing, engineering, and mathematics. The goal, he says, should be to cultivate a homegrown talent pool that does not merely use artificial intelligence, but designs and builds AI-powered solutions, positioning T&T as a regional digital innovation leader.
For the manufacturing sector, Singh proposed performance-linked incentives tied directly to production output, job creation, productivity gains, innovation investment, and export growth, noting that the Caribbean Community (Caricom) represents a natural, accessible near-term export market for local manufacturers. He also pushed for widespread regulatory reform to cut red tape for new and expanding businesses, calling for the expansion of the Single Electronic Window to streamline approvals. Currently, he pointed out, investors are forced to navigate a maze of multiple ministries and separate agencies just to launch a new business, a barrier that discourages both local and foreign investment.
Singh expressed public support for ongoing non-energy foreign investment projects, including the planned steel plant and new data center developments. He stressed that existing energy sector revenues should be leveraged to finance diversification efforts, rather than being diverted to non-productive spending, and that government budgets should prioritize investment in productive assets that drive long-term growth. He also advocated for targeted procurement preferences for competitive, high-quality local suppliers, arguing that government purchasing power should be used to nurture competitive local businesses – not to permanently protect inefficient enterprises that fail to deliver value for money.
To reduce T&T’s heavy reliance on food imports, Singh called for targeted investment in domestic agricultural production, processing, cold storage, and last-mile distribution infrastructure. To unlock the country’s existing domestic capital, he proposed expanding access to venture capital, establishing dedicated development funds, and scaling up public-private partnership frameworks to redirect national savings into productive private sector investment. “We have capital in this country. The challenge is getting more of it into productive economic activity,” he noted.
Finally, Singh called for a holistic overhaul of entrepreneurship support, combining seed grants with wrap-around services including mentorship, marketing support, accounting guidance, and export assistance. He also highlighted the need for cross-economy productivity improvements, including expanded worker training, broader adoption of modern technology, and greater efficiency in public sector operations.
Summarizing his core ask ahead of the budget, Singh said: “We want the Government to create the conditions for Trinbagonians to produce, innovate, invest and export. We should produce something the world wants. That is what economic independence should look like.”