July 2019 Newsletter

Successive administrations have paid nothing but lip-service to economic diversification via the Maritime sector. Even as the country’s GDP continues to decline, along with our long-term sovereign rating, the lip-service continues and it appears neither policy nor institutional mechanisms are being put in place to achieve this diversification. Even if efforts are being made, they are painfully out of step with the opportunities which abound now.

There currently exists a multitude of investment opportunities in the maritime sector including; bunkering (establishment of a regime rather than the current ad-hoc strategy); transshipment of commodities – also known as ship-to-ship transfers; dry-docking& ship repair; and logistics.

A December 2016 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report stated that of a sample of 38 mostly Western Hemisphere countries, T & T's Customs is among the three worst. The other two countries were Haiti – the poorest country in the hemisphere, and Bolivia. This indictment was unsurprising to intermediaries in the Maritime Sector, who for years have been feeling the impact of a Customs Administration rife with ad-hoc and contradictory procedures, absent standard operating procedures (SOPs), questionable regulations, transaction fees which appear to have no basis in law, and obsolete practices which have their basis in colonial times, when the policy prescription was different, and in the total absence of automation, and the continuance of which serve only to generate windfall revenues for Customs.

As a twin island state, movement of cargo by sea between ports within each island and between both islands should be a no-brainer. Instead, the process can be so inefficient and burdensome that international carriers opt to call at only one port, and cargo that can effectively be moved by sea instead has to be moved by road and by heavily subsidized ferry; in the case of Tobago. The single piece of legislation responsible for this is the Droghers Act.

The Droghers Act was first passed into law in 1914 and has since been amended twice; in 1921 and in 1964. On a basic level, the Act was designed to regulate the movement of vessels coastwise, as a means of regulating trade within ports in Trinidad & Tobago.