Trinidad Hosts Fifth Summit of the Americas
Believe it or not, little ole Trinidad and Tobago will host the Fifth Summit of the Americas today with attendees including Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, U.N Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, U.S President Barack Obama, U.S Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and heads of state and other representatives from the following member states :
- Antigua & Barbuda
- Argentina
- Bahamas
- Barbados
- Belize
- Bolivia
- Brazil
- Canada
- Chile
- Colombia
- Costa Rica
- Dominica
- Dominican Republic
- Ecuador
- El Salvador
- Grenada
- Guatemala
- Guyana
- Haiti
- Honduras
- Jamaica
- Mexico
- Nicaragua
- Panama
- Paraguay
- Peru
- St. Kitts & Nevis
- St. Lucia
- St. Vincent & Grenadines
- Suriname
- Trinidad & Tobago
- United States
- Uruguay
- Venezuela
The official web site for the Summit of the Americas is here, they have a Facebook page and they’re even on Twitter as well. You can chat live about it at an official Summit of the Americas chatroom.
Chatter about the Summit naturally is exploding all over the news and blogosphere because of Obama’s slated attendance :
- Obama and the Summit of the Americas: One Eye Wide Open, Another Shut
- President Obama and the 5th Summit of the Americas: Your Thoughts?
- Interview: Obama’s first visit to Latin America will be a “listening trip”
- Fifth Summit of The Americas
- Expectations for the Fifth Summit of the Americas
- Americas: The 5th Summit Gets Underway
Now for the grim reality. The government of Trinidad and Tobago is spending between $1 billion to $2 billion TT dollars (US$161 million - US$323 million) of taxpayer money on the Summit. So far they are yet to publicly disclose the exact figure.
Trinidad’s GDP is only about US$15 billion. Trinidad is therefore spending about 13% of its GDP just to host the Summit. Prime Minister of Trinidad Patrick Manning has been mentioning his intentions to host the Summit for years. He has translated this into creating state agencies to quickly renovate and construct high-rise buildings in and around Port-of-Spain and the country each costing hundreds of millions of dollars. So the real cost of the Summit may be even scarier.
To put this into perspective, the G20 Summit hosted in London costed just £20 million or TT$180 million or US$29 million. So Trinidad is spending as much as 10 times the cost of the G20 Summit for the Summit of the Americas.
This is an absolute scandal and waste of money looking at it from all angles :
- The Summit of the Americas member countries, subtracting its G20 member countries of Canada, the United States, Mexico and Argentina account for just 2.7% of the world’s GDP. The G20 member countries account for 85% of the world’s GDP. Why then is 10 times more money being spent on the Summit of the Americas?
- Trinidad and Tobago lacks infrastructure and public utilities such as roads, hospitals, law enforcement and reliable water and electricity. US$300 million could have been put towards these inadequacies, instead of a fanfare meeting of leaders who will do nothing about these problems.
- The economy is slowly ailing in Trinidad and Tobago. Just recently it was reported that over 100 workers were laid off from a major Steel manufacturer and A/C unit manufacturer each. Along with the global economic crisis you would think the government of a third-world country with already little resources would be more prudent in its spending.
All this plus controversial actions of the government to do such things “in preparation for the Summit” such as :
- Suddenly see the urge to have working sanitation units….but only for the routes where the officials have to pass.
- Building a wall to enclose a depressed community in Port-of-Spain
- Suddenly see the urge to take homeless, mentally ill people who live on the streets of Port-of-Spain.
- Order hundreds of high-priced buses and boats for security and transportation of officials.
- Put all citizens of Trinidad who reside in North Trinidad under a 24 hour curfew on the day of the Summit.
- Have random security “dry-runs” weeks before the Summit much to the disdain of all motorists.
It really angers me to see abject stupidity coming from Trinidadians such as :
“go trinidad is my honor to hear this news and this is a great thing for my homeland trinidad and tobago. They will be put into the world map and i am very pleased to hear that this is taking place back home.”
“Yes we are Ready for the hosting of the 5th Summit of the Americas, according to the Prime Minister Patrick Manning, The hosting of the Summit will be a benefit to the citizens of our country and i am in total agreement with the Prime Minister”
How can grown men and women be so foolish? Maybe its true, you do indeed get the government which you deserve.
For more great summaries of the Fifth Summit of the Americas, check out:
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Interesting considering wht Hillary Clinton said today - they DO intend to do a lot about education, health and poverty in ALL the LAC countries at the Summit. I think that all the people writing negative things about the summit should be more even handed. The Summit is a good thing for LAC, it has brought benefits to LAC in the past, and there is no reason to assume that just because it is here in T&T, it will be a waste of time and $$. $$ spent to increase regional cooperation and trade and other agreements with LAC is definitely $$ well spent if you take a long term and global view.
So basically you’re saying Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric and intentions are worth over TT$1 billion?
To be even handed, Trinidad is mentioned on MSNBC, CNN, BBC, Fox News right now….they have live pictures of President Obama arriving, wow.
Its ridiculous to take a long term view if many of the problems of the LAC and OAS could be helped immediately with better government, less corruption and better accountability to their constituents. Not to mention the long term view for everyone right now is grim as with whatever economic recovery there may be, the U.S debt still continues climbs over $11 trillion setting up an even worse crisis later on.
This isn’t a meeting where all the poor countries of the Caribbean sit on the proverbial lap of the U.S and just receive benefits, they have their own agenda and concerns, which are mutually exclusive to the Caribbean’s concerns. I’ll gladly retract this post if anyone can show me ONE truly good thing the Summit can bring to Trinidad and Tobago other than 5 minutes of fame.
Your numbers don’t add up. If we spend TT$2 billion on the summit, and our GDP is US$15 billion / TT$90 billion, then we spent 4.5% of our GDP on the summit. High but not as outrageous as 13%.
Ack. If I use an exchange rate of $6.30 instead of $6.00, then our GDP is TT$94.3 billion and the percentage of GDP is 2.1% and not 4.5%. My bad.
Anon - just for comparison, the average percentage of the GDP devoted to healthcare is abt 2.0% per year. And no matter how much the Govt protests about the revamped health-centres, there are STILL only THREE fully functional public hospitals in Trinidad, two along the East-West corridor, and one catering for the other 500,000 ppl down in the Southland. I won’t even go into the issues about the state of the roads, the lack of reliable public transportation, the ppl who still have no reliable water supply, the exponential crime and murder rate or anything else. If you exist in Trinidad in any real way outside of a little airy bubble you already know these things.
The only thing to be reaped from this short-term massive expenditure is another place to skim money, to line pockets in as opaque and invisible a manner as possible. That, and plastering over sores in the short term knowing they’ll all erupt again as soon as the event is over. Reminds me a bit of the lockdown we’ve become acclimatized to every year for Carnival - when for those two days everything must go well, to hell with the rest of the year - or the decade.
Is there an official cost of this summit somewhere or is this just another hit job on Trinidad being done by a few that have no clue as to what they are speaking about?
Hi, good post. I have been wondering about this issue,so thanks for posting. I will certainly be subscribing to your blog.
I’m sure most of us have looked at search results, and followed it up by checking the backlinks of the top 10 sites….and then scratched our heads and said that i’m a fuckin idiot for spamming this blog with nonsensical comments.
thats very interesting. thx for sharing.