As geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions be­tween Venezuela and the Unit­ed States re­ver­ber­ate across the Caribbean, the cruise sec­tor, of­ten treat­ed as a barom­e­ter of in­ter­na­tion­al con­fi­dence, has been forced in­to a pe­ri­od of height­ened un­cer­tain­ty. For this coun­try, the stakes are par­tic­u­lar­ly high, as Car­ni­val is not on­ly po­si­tioned as a cul­tur­al flag­ship but al­so as a crit­i­cal for­eign ex­change earn­er at a time of per­sis­tent eco­nom­ic pres­sure.

On pa­per, in­fla­tion is pro­ject­ed to re­main low and growth is ex­pect­ed to be mod­est. The IMF’s coun­try view puts pro­ject­ed re­al GDP growth for 2026 at 1.0 per cent and con­sumer price in­fla­tion at 1.5 per cent. Yet walk in­to any board­room, re­tail out­let or small ser­vice busi­ness and you will hear the same con­cerns: cus­tomers are cau­tious, loy­al­ty is frag­ile and switch­ing is faster than ever.

Are T&T’s hopes of se­cur­ing long-term en­er­gy se­cu­ri­ty through Venezuela’s Drag­on gas project are fad­ing fast?

Agos­ti­ni Ltd has un­der­gone a trans­for­ma­tion since 2020, more than dou­bling the scale of its op­er­a­tions through a com­bi­na­tion of strate­gic ac­qui­si­tions and steady or­gan­ic growth across its phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, health­care, man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion busi­ness­es.

The world is un­der­go­ing a fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion. The ques­tion is whether T&T will keep pace with this rate of change. If we do not, then we will be falling be­hind. Take the com­put­er, a de­vice that we use every­day. For 60 years, it has op­er­at­ed un­der the same ba­sic mod­el: pro­gram­mers write ex­plic­it in­struc­tions, proces­sors ex­e­cute them se­quen­tial­ly, and ap­pli­ca­tions re­trieve pre­built re­spons­es from stor­age. That mod­el is end­ing. In its place, a new par­a­digm is emerg­ing that will make the close of 2026 look re­mark­ably dif­fer­ent from where we stand to­day. For T&T, an econ­o­my al­ready grap­pling with the en­er­gy tran­si­tion and mount­ing de­mo­graph­ic pres­sures, this shift presents both sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges and un­ex­pect­ed op­por­tu­ni­ties that de­mand our im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion.

As the then-out­go­ing Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) chair’s end of year mes­sage made clear, “[t]his year [i.e. 2025], Cari­com made mean­ing­ful progress in ad­vanc­ing re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion and eco­nom­ic growth.”

Pro­posed moves by the Unit­ed States to ex­ert long-term con­trol over Venezuela’s oil pro­duc­tion and sales could have wide-rang­ing im­pli­ca­tions for glob­al en­er­gy mar­kets, the Caribbean and re­gion­al oil-pro­duc­ing states such as Guyana, ac­cord­ing to in­ter­na­tion­al re­la­tions spe­cial­ist Dr Mark Kir­ton.

Af­ter months of un­cer­tain­ty, some cus­tomers of Trin­ba­go Ex­press USA have be­gun re­ceiv­ing long-de­layed car­go, fol­low­ing in­ter­ven­tion by the Port Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (PATT). How­ev­er, sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns re­main, par­tic­u­lar­ly for cus­tomers whose goods are still held at oth­er ports, in­clud­ing the Port of Point Lisas.

The eco­nom­ic down­turn has claimed two more ca­su­al­ties in T&T’s busi­ness land­scape, with Movi­eTowne clos­ing its To­ba­go cin­e­ma and The Home Store clos­ing its Ch­agua­nas branch.

Sales at one of the coun­try’s most pop­u­lar fast food fran­chis­es have plateaued due to job loss­es and gen­er­al eco­nom­ic un­cer­tain­ty in T&T.

En­er­gy pol­i­cy, geopol­i­tics and in­dus­tri­al up­heaval con­verged in 2025 to re­de­fine T&T’s eco­nom­ic land­scape. The year un­fold­ed as a study in con­trasts: ma­jor up­stream progress at home, a re­newed vote of con­fi­dence from a glob­al oil ma­jor, and, at the same time, the col­lapse of care­ful­ly ne­go­ti­at­ed cross-bor­der gas arrange­ments and the ex­it of a long-stand­ing petro­chem­i­cal pro­duc­er. To­geth­er, these de­vel­op­ments un­der­scored both the re­silience and fragili­ty of an econ­o­my still an­chored in nat­ur­al gas.

The old north Eu­ro­pean lan­guages had a word for the sci­ence of gov­ern­ment, state­craft, which is the art and dis­ci­pline of build­ing, run­ning, and adapt­ing the state.