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Fazir Khan, pres­i­dent of the Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Coun­cil for the Con­struc­tion In­dus­try (JCC), has strong­ly re­ject­ed any sug­ges­tion that T&T could af­ford to dis­count or jeop­ar­dise its re­la­tion­ship with Cari­com, warn­ing that such a stance would un­der­mine the coun­try’s eco­nom­ic re­silience. Khan told Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day that the ev­i­dence is un­equiv­o­cal that Cari­com is not mere­ly an im­por­tant trad­ing part­ner, but an in­dis­pens­able one, par­tic­u­lar­ly for the non-en­er­gy and con­struc­tion sec­tors, as the coun­try seeks to di­ver­si­fy away from hy­dro­car­bons. Of­fi­cial trade sta­tis­tics show that Cari­com is Trinidad and To­ba­go’s sec­ond-largest ex­port mar­ket, ac­count­ing for rough­ly ten per cent of to­tal glob­al ex­ports and an even larg­er pro­por­tion of non-en­er­gy ex­ports.

When pe­tro­le­um and pe­tro­le­um prod­ucts are ex­clud­ed, ex­ports to Cari­com have been es­ti­mat­ed at more than US$560 mil­lion in a re­cent bench­mark year. This rep­re­sents ap­prox­i­mate­ly 25 per cent of all in­tra-re­gion­al ex­ports, by far the largest share held by any Cari­com mem­ber state.