of the Port and the displacing of more than 6,000 permanent employees, in addition to job cuts at WASA, TELCO, TTEC, the Public Sector etc. in short, the pauperisation of our already depressed communities.

These “astute” businessmen together with their friends in the then National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) Government, boasted that these World Bank and IMF-administered medications were necessary to cure us of our chronic economic diseases.

They and the government didn’t listen, but went ahead with their deadly plans.

They began to sell off our State enterprises left, right and centre, offering workers VSEP in the process.

They took away the buses and the bus passes from the young and the elderly.

They took away book grants and discontinued the school-feeding programme.

They introduced trade liberalisation and refused to put any legal mechanism in place to protect local producers from unfair trade practices.

Our country soon became the dumping ground for inferior second-rate foreign-manufactured goods.

So the job losses spread to the local manufacturing sector and have continued unabated since.

Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP) forced thousands of decent law-abiding citizens to switch to illegal activities to survive.

Port of Spain experienced a groundswell of illegal vending; hustlers selling any and everything.

SAP created a large army of illegal drug sellers across our national landscape.

SAP also created a rich class of drug importers and gun-runners.

The existence and mode of operations of this underworld mafia are not as untenable as the Minister of National Security will like to have us believe.

It is the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) who a few years ago publicly stated that the drug trade in the Caribbean is valued at US $55 billion per year.

It is the said people who have destroyed large sectors of our formal economy who are today telling us about “a Death March” to rid our country of drug-related criminal activities. They can no longer boast about SAP because they now realise the destruction it has brought to our shores.

They are afraid to talk about globalisation because two World Trade Organisation (WTO) conferences have failed recently; and developing countries are now demanding that European countries and the US stop subsidising agriculture and their livestock industry, while they penalise Third World countries for doing same.

The USA, once the murder capital of the globe, is now trailing Trinidad and Tobago (thanks to the big boost to their USA) economy from the export of billions of US dollars from Third World nations, including TnT, towards debt servicing) which now ranks No. 5 in the world.

According to an editorial of the Newsday of October 14, 2005, TnT’s murder rate “is now at 30 for every 100,000”, while the US stands “at 16 for every 100,000 persons”.

The murder and crime rates in Trinidad and Tobago are inextricably linked to the drug trade.

Young people in depressed communities, whose parents or guardians were the victims of SAP have turned to illegal underworld activities as a means of earning a living.

It follows then, that to curb the crime problem we must deal head-on with the drug trade and the lucrative spin of activity of gun-running.

We must also create decent alternative and sustainable means of livelihood.

Allow me to close by saying that it was most unfortunate that our Junior Minister of National Security should let the importers of guns and cocaine off the hook and instead attack “the ghetto youths as the main perpetrators of crime” (Newsday of 27/10/05).

Honourary Minister, we know, and you know that the drug problem needs to be attacked from the supply end, and the young gangsters in Laventille and the EDR are just pawns in a game 10 billion times larger than they are.