Seaboard Marine has once again been honored with a Quest for Quality Award from Logistics Management, being recognized as the top ocean carrier in the world by their readers.

The results were announced in the August 2021 issue of Logistics Management. Industry professionals view the recognition bestowed by Logistics Management as the gold standard for measuring customer satisfaction and performance excellence for carriers, ports, and logistics providers worldwide.

Quest for Quality has been an essential gauge of customer satisfaction and performance excellence in the transportation and logistics industry for nearly four decades. To determine their findings, Logistics Management polled qualified subscribers of the publication to rate ocean carriers based on key service quality criteria. Over 4,500 ballots were cast. Of the six scoring categories (On-time Performance, Value, Information Technology, Customer Service, Equipment and Operations, and Total Weighted Score), Seaboard Marine ranked first in Equipment & Operations, Value, tied for first in On-Time Performance, and took top honors in Total Weighted Score as the leading ocean transportation provider. The readers of Logistics Management also rated Seaboard Marine as the highest-rated overall shipping line in 2020.

Edward Gonzalez, Seaboard Marine President, said, "We are honored to once again be recognized as the top ocean carrier in the world. It is a testament to the service we provide to our customers and the exceptional job our employees have done and continue to do, despite the challenges of the pandemic over the last eighteen months. We are grateful and appreciative of the support of our customers and business partners throughout the Trade and Logistics industry."

Source: Seaboard Marine Online

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.