(Excerpts of Dr Friday’s presentation at a recent Public Meeting in South Leeward)
“We have a plan as to how we are going to develop the country. We have taken the four major productive sectors of the economy and will focus on them.
We call them the four pillars. One is agriculture. You know as government, they think agriculture is for the past. We don’t. We believe agriculture has a bright future. For us, agriculture is essential to the prosperity of Vincent and the Grenadines. The next pillar is our tourism sector. It has tremendous potential. We have just touched the tip of what is possible in this country. The third, is what we call the blue economy. That involves fishing. It involves the yachting industry which is very close to my heart. And we also have the Ottley Hall Marina and Shipyard, which we will focus on. And I promise you, we will get that working within the first term of an NDP government, creating jobs, especially for our young people. It will have this part of the country humming.
And of course we have the fourth pillar. We call the new economy. This involves areas that we don’t normally think of as economic activity. You heard Dr. Shallow talked about sports. That is one area. We have also talked about the creative industries. What we have now coming out of carnival to help our young people to be able to achieve their ambitions, their dreams, their skills, their talents, to see how far I can take them. Handicraft industry, information technology, those areas that are new in a sense as economic activity to our economy.
I want to elaborate on what Dr. Shallow said earlier. He talked about sports. This is an area which has tremendous opportunities. I remember when I was growing up, a number of young people loved cricket. I loved cricket too but hardly anybody except Mike Findlay made it onto West Indies team and even when they made West Indies team you couldn’t make a living from it. Now there are so many different leagues all around the world playing cricket, and many people who can make a living from it; we have to give our young people an opportunity to do it.
In basketball, Adonal Foyle from Canouan made a good living as a basketball player. We have to give our young people those opportunities. So, what we have done. We have said that we are going to focus on creating an environment to help to lift our sports people up. One of things we have done we have developed a plan; we call the National Athletes Program and what that says that young persons of talent in every field of sport whether they are recognized by their coaches of their associations will be put forward to what in a sense will be amount to National Scholarships in the sporting arena. So that they will have support from the state so they could pay for their shoes, they could pay for their training and so forth. Because we recognize that these young people, have talent, they have promise.
Those who have already achieved a certain amount, we will also put the resources behind them. You have one or two athletes who have made it, whether it’s in cricket, basketball or in athletics and their names get out there. The return to this country is much greater even than for us here as politicians can do. And they dare themselves, they make a decent living, but they put our names on the map and then people start coming and then people start looking at us and there’s so many opportunities you can’t even imagine how the spin-offs are actually going to affect us positively. It’s an investment in them and it’s an investment in the country.
So, we have the National Athletes Program which we will implement in St Vincent and the Grenadines. They have a similar program in St Lucia. It’s not rocket science. All we need to do is put our minds to it and to understand what the potential is and make sure that we give our young people the opportunity to take advantage of them.
We also have of course in the creative industries, the talented people, our Vincentian music, our writers, our artists, give them the opportunity also, and the DJs. They are potential economic drivers in our economy. We have to take every opportunity we can. I believe in our people, whether it’s in agriculture, in sports, or in the creative industries. I believe in them, so I want us to invest in them. And in turn, they will lift themselves up and lift up our people.
I said to you that one of the pillars of the economy that we talk about is the blue economy. That involves fishing. And I know that you have fishing villages here. You have in Questelles, in Clare Valley, and we have over in Lowmans Bay. But the government said they put their village there and they’ve done nothing.
People look at fishermen and they say, listen, that is almost like the lowest job. But think of the potential. The fishing industry in Grenada, for example, generates 10 times as much as ours for export. And you know why? Because they have invested in better boats, in bigger boats, in long line fishing, in tuna fishing. And they sell $150 million, to our 20 or 30 million dollars that we do. There’s tremendous potential. And we have more water around us than them because we’re an archipelago. We have so much potential there. I want to tell the fisher folk, as I want to tell the farmers, that the New Democratic Party government, we have built our economic program on you. So, you have to succeed for us to succeed.”
