Foreword

• Author: Wendell Mottley
• Profession: New York-based Investment Banker having previously served as executive director of the company which eventually became the pivot of Trinidad and Tobago s natural gas-led industrialization and as Minister of Finance, credited with playing a decisive role in setting Trinidad and Tobago on a sustained path of growth from 1994 onwards
• Pages: 7-8

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

vii

FOREWORD

In the course of my 38 years in the U.S. Congress, and for the

last year as the chairman of the House Committee on Ways and

Means, I have come to believe that free and fair trade benefits the

American economy, and the U.S. worker, and promotes higher

standards of living and political stability in the countries with whom

we trade. Given the vocal opposition to trade agreements based

upon the perception that the U.S. has lost jobs, a better case for the

benefits derived from trade has to be made in order to convince the

American worker and we must provide opportunities for retraining.

Similarly, U.S. companies must be encouraged to invest in

developing nations in order to assist in their economic growth and

development.

I have, therefore, been a principal architect of the Caribbean

Basin Initiative (CBI) and the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act

(AGOA), both of which are U.S. policy initiatives designed to secure

the benefits of free and fair trade to the nations of the Caribbean

and Africa. My work in support of Caribbean economic development

began more than 25 years ago, in the early 1980s, with the creation

of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) — legislation to implement

a programme designed to confer trade benefits to the Caribbean.

Later, in the course of promoting the CBI, I first met the author of

this book, Wendell Mottley, who was then Finance Minister of

Trinidad and Tobago.

Trinidad and Tobago, a Caribbean state of just over one million

persons, punches well above its weight in global energy trade.

Trinidad and Tobago supplies the U.S. with approximately 70 per

cent of our imports of environmentally friendly Liquefied Natural

Gas (LNG) and is the major supplier of ammonia fertilizers to our

farmers.

This book by Wendell Mottley explains how a small Caribbean

country, through a highly orchestrated programme of energy

industrialization, makes such an outsized contribution to U.S. energy