Ho­tel can­cel­la­tions are af­fect­ing To­ba­go’s tourism sec­tor as the is­land finds it­self on the front lines of a deep­en­ing re­gion­al cri­sis.

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.

The Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny has an­nounced the ac­qui­si­tion of Trinidad Re­gion On­shore Com­pres­sor (TROC) from bp Trinidad and To­ba­go (bpTT).

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.

Sea­son­al sales are not of­ten seen as slow or stag­nant, but the re­cent weeks have seen these words used as the de­scrip­tor across var­i­ous sec­tors in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

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.”

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

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.

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.

From Sep­tem­ber 2, 2025—which was the day of the first US strike on ves­sels in the South­ern Caribbean that were al­leged to be car­ry­ing il­le­gal drugs and nar­co­traf­fick­ers—T&T Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar em­braced the new Amer­i­can pol­i­cy of deal­ing with mar­itime craft in this re­gion.

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.

Guardian Me­dia has con­firmed that the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC), Jay­selle Mc­Far­lane, has ten­dered her res­ig­na­tion af­ter al­most five years of ser­vice.