Having watched and listened to the Tourism Minister, the Hon. Mr. Ross, on the CNC3 morning programme this morning, I can safely say that tourism is without a plan.

Minister Ross has failed at the starting point. He has no idea what the value of Carnival is to the economy of Trinidad and Tobago (hotels, travel, taxi drivers, vendors, mass bands, etc.). As Minister of Tourism for over a year, the Minister should be in a position to tell the nation what the value of the biggest tourism event in Trinidad and Tobago is. How else can it be evaluated as viable or not? How else can he assess if it requires development or not? Maybe it is a drain on national resources, who knows?

As energy revenues become less reliable, tourism must be viewed as a sector for serious and sustainable development. The Minister stated that in addition to Carnival, the government is looking at conference tourism, eco tourism and cultural tourism as areas for development.

The Prime Minister stated in Parliament recently that the investment in "Summit Hosting" will yield increases in conference tourism. I am certain that the Tourism Minister cannot say what the value of conference tourism is at present and therefore what the projected increase is to be. Everything seems a bit willy nilly. What we do know is that we are spending over $500 million to market this new sector of conference tourism in addition to the billions that were spent on facilities. Interestingly the main benefactor to conference tourism is likely to be the Hyatt International, an organisation not owned by citizens of Trinidad and Tobago but already the beneficiary of a sweetheart management deal courtesy Udecott.

The Minister may not even be able to tell us how much we are spending to market Carnival (from his interview it would seem to be almost nothing) and he definitely cannot tell us what the projected increase in benefit is likely to be because he cannot now quantify or know what the present benefit is.    

Cultural tourism is another non-starter. Calypso is not being sustained in any significant way nor are any of the other diverse cultural expressions of this nation.

It can hardly be seen how cruise ship tourism can continue to be viable when the most visible tourism sights are the vagrants, the filth on the POS streets and the national crime rate.