The Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (CARI­COM) is call­ing for stronger poli­cies to pro­tect the rights of In­dige­nous Peo­ples and ex­pand op­por­tu­ni­ties for their so­cial and eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment across the re­gion.

As the Ja­maican ex­pe­ri­ence in 2025 with Hur­ri­cane Melis­sa shows, it is im­por­tant to have ef­fec­tive stormwa­ter man­age­ment sys­tems or else busi­ness­es and the econ­o­my can be af­fect­ed.

It is easy to con­clude that ‘sport for all’ is an au­to­mat­ic panacea for so­cial is­sues, es­pe­cial­ly those that are nau­se­at­ing and vex­a­tious. Sport for De­vel­op­ment (SfD) has gained mo­men­tum since 2003, when the Unit­ed Na­tions (UN) Gen­er­al As­sem­bly adopt­ed key res­o­lu­tions of the UN In­ter-Agency Task Force for Sport for De­vel­op­ment and Peace, es­tab­lished in 2002. SfD draws up­on the pop­u­lar ap­peal across so­cio-eco­nom­ic de­mo­graph­ics of sport as a pos­si­ble so­cial trans­for­ma­tion­al tool. How­ev­er, achiev­ing con­sis­tent short-, medi­um-, and long-term sus­tain­able so­cial out­comes is root­ed in wider his­tor­i­cal so­cial and eco­nom­ic fac­tors that must al­so be ad­dressed for sport to pro­duce de­sired re­sults.

As Panazz: The Sto­ry is cel­e­brat­ed in Wash­ing­ton, DC, on Tues­day to mark World Steel­pan Day, for­mer Panazz leader and mu­si­cal di­rec­tor Bar­ry Bartholomew is re­flect­ing on the un­like­ly jour­ney that trans­formed a Har­vard school as­sign­ment in­to an in­ter­na­tion­al­ly ac­claimed doc­u­men­tary.

Last week’s col­umn ar­gued that Trinidad and To­ba­go did mod­er­ate­ly well from its en­er­gy re­sources, es­pe­cial­ly gas, start­ing with the ex­port of liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas in 1999. How­ev­er, it not­ed that the 2018 “Spot­light on En­er­gy Con­fer­ence” es­tab­lished that the en­er­gy sec­tor’s busi­ness mod­el had sub­stan­tial weak­ness­es, re­sult­ing in sig­nif­i­cant val­ue loss. In ad­di­tion to de­clin­ing pro­duc­tion of oil and nat­ur­al gas, it not­ed ob­so­lete, un­chang­ing busi­ness and leg­isla­tive mod­els that failed to keep pace with the shift from an oil-based to a nat­ur­al gas-dri­ven econ­o­my.