With the Car­ni­val sea­son and in­creased cruise ship ar­rivals on the hori­zon, the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce says it is crit­i­cal to ad­dress any po­ten­tial con­cerns stem­ming from the State of Emer­gency (SoE) re­gard­ing the safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty of vis­i­tors.

In a state­ment is­sued on Wednes­day, the Cham­ber said it recog­nised the need for the gov­ern­ment to ex­tend the SoE by three months, but it urged rel­e­vant state agen­cies to work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly to re­as­sure both tourists and in­vestors of the ro­bust mea­sures be­ing im­ple­ment­ed to en­sure their safe­ty.

“Trans­paren­cy and proac­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion are es­sen­tial in fos­ter­ing con­fi­dence and main­tain­ing the pos­i­tive rep­u­ta­tion of T&T as a pre­mier des­ti­na­tion for both leisure and busi­ness,” it said.

In terms of in­vestor con­fi­dence, the Cham­ber recog­nised that the SoE may have cre­at­ed some ap­pre­hen­sion among po­ten­tial in­vestors, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who are new­er mar­ket en­trants or more risk-averse.

Not­ing that while there is a recog­ni­tion that crime is an on­go­ing chal­lenge in T&T, the Cham­ber said some in­vestors have raised con­cerns about the cur­rent se­cu­ri­ty sit­u­a­tion, and how this might af­fect their in­vest­ment de­ci­sions.

“That said, many in­vestors un­der­stand that coun­tries around the world face sim­i­lar chal­lenges, and some have high­er crime rates than T&T. Those in­vestors who are more fa­mil­iar with nav­i­gat­ing such en­vi­ron­ments are more ob­ser­vant of the sit­u­a­tion but re­main open to op­por­tu­ni­ties while un­der­tak­ing their due dili­gence.

“How­ev­er, for those new­er in­vestors, there has been no­tice­able hes­i­ta­tion. The TT Cham­ber has been trans­par­ent with these in­vestors, ex­plain­ing that while the SoE is one of the mea­sures in place to com­bat crime, it is on­ly part of a broad­er strat­e­gy. We are hope­ful that once the ob­jec­tives of the SoE are achieved in tan­dem with oth­er strate­gies, nor­mal­cy will re­turn, and con­fi­dence in T&T as an in­vest­ment des­ti­na­tion will be re­stored,” it added.

Fur­ther, the Cham­ber said while some mem­bers of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty ac­knowl­edged the pos­i­tive ef­fects of the SoE in ad­dress­ing crime, there are still con­cerns re­gard­ing its over­all ef­fec­tive­ness, par­tic­u­lar­ly in re­la­tion to the scope of po­lice raids and the seizure of firearms, es­pe­cial­ly se­mi-au­to­mat­ic weapons, which were ini­tial­ly cit­ed as a key rea­son for im­ple­ment­ing the SoE.

“While we sup­port any mea­sure that can help curb crime and con­tribute to solv­ing this na­tion­al prob­lem, crime does not have a sin­gle root cause. A more holis­tic ap­proach is need­ed to ad­dress the com­plex­i­ties of crime, in­cor­po­rat­ing short, medi­um, and long-term strate­gies. This in­cludes ad­dress­ing the so­cial is­sues that con­tribute to crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty, as well as the op­er­a­tional en­vi­ron­ment in which busi­ness­es func­tion,” the Cham­ber ad­vised.

Stat­ing that it is op­ti­mistic that, with the right bal­ance of short-term and long-term mea­sures, the gov­ern­ment can ad­dress both the im­me­di­ate se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns and the broad­er is­sues im­pact­ing the busi­ness en­vi­ron­ment, the Cham­ber em­pha­sised that sta­ble and se­cure en­vi­ron­ment is cru­cial for sus­tain­ing in­vestor in­ter­est and main­tain­ing con­fi­dence in the coun­try’s growth po­ten­tial.