(Trinidad Guardian) Over the last ten years T&T’s population has grown by only seven per cent and there is an ageing “population bulge” problem, Minister of Planning and Sustainable Development Dr Bhoe Tewarie says. “T&T has a population of 1.3 million and over the last ten years, the population has grown by only 70,000,” he said. “This means there are a lot of people over the age of 40. We’ve got a population bulge problem.” He said the youth population is smaller than ideal to drive the country’s development strategy.
Tewarie made the point during his address to participants at a national consultation on the United Nations’ 2015 Development Agenda organised by the UN and his ministry at Hilton Trinidad and Conference Centre in Port-of-Spain yesterday. He was speaking on the topic titled Managed Migration which was identified as an area of discussion at the consultation.
Questioned on managed migration by the media afterwards, he said: “We don’t want a situation in which anybody who wants to come (to T&T) can just come…Our responsibility as a Government is to manage the migration process.” He said there was need for a purposeful migration policy which would look at, among other things, entrepreneurship among migrants to T&T, and migrants should not become a burden to the State but contribute to development.
Tewarie said the census suggested migration to T&T was happening in a haphazard fashion. Managed migration, for example, is when nurses are brought from St Vincent or doctors from Cuba by the Health Ministry, he said. There has been an influx of migrants from Guyana, China and Nigeria but the minister said it did not matter what country they came from. “What matters is what contribution they make,” he said.
The well-attended consultation was titled, The Future We Want-2015 Development Agenda/Small Island Developing States (SIDS) Consultation. Tewarie said the UN group in T&T recently approached his ministry to ask it to partner with the group to host the consultation. “This was so we can lend our voice to the global debate on the post-2015 development agenda and for the preparation of the national report on SIDS.
Other areas identified for discussion at the consultation included:
• poverty eradication and gender equality
• food security
• crime
Tewarie said since T&T signed the UN Declaration in 2000, successive governments had been diligently pursuing the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs include poverty reduction, education, gender and environmental sustainability and T&T is well poised to achieve most of the targets by 2015, he said. Proper healthcare remains a serious concern, however, especially maternal and child mortality.
The minister said T&T, in 2012, ranked 67th out of 186 countries on the Human Development Index and was classed as a country with high human development. The Caribbean Human Development Report 2012 also said T&T was one of three countries that experienced rapid human development between 2005 and 2011.
