The world is in a whirl­wind of trade wars due to tar­iffs that have been threat­ened to be im­posed by Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump. Still, Cari­com coun­tries are is hop­ing to avoid se­vere eco­nom­ic fall­out as a re­sult of an­oth­er US pol­i­cy.

Last month, the US Trade Rep­re­sen­ta­tive’s of­fice pro­posed charg­ing up to US$1.5 mil­lion per port vis­it for Chi­nese-built ves­sels en­ter­ing US ports as part of its in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to Chi­na’s grow­ing dom­i­na­tion of the glob­al ship­build­ing, mar­itime and lo­gis­tics sec­tors.

The Cari­com Pri­vate Sec­tor Or­gan­i­sa­tion has said the mea­sure if im­ple­ment­ed, would be worse than COVID-19’s im­pact on the Caribbean ship­ping and the sup­ply chain.

“There is a com­par­i­son be­ing made to COVID and the im­pact on the sup­ply chain and this is­sue,” said Dar­win Tele­maque, CEO of the An­tigua and Bar­bu­da Port Au­thor­i­ty dur­ing a vir­tu­al meet­ing host­ed by the CP­SO. The meet­ing dis­cussed the im­pli­ca­tions for the 50 to 60 per cent in­creas­es in ship­ping costs to and from the Caribbean.

“Dur­ing COVID, we had a mas­sive im­pact on the sup­ply chain, rates went up sig­nif­i­cant­ly but most­ly out of the Far East, the Mediter­ranean and Eu­rope. What we found were that re­gion­al lines, for the most part, there were min­i­mal in­creas­es. They held the line, re­gion­al car­ri­ers were not fol­low­ing the path of bring­ing on those as­tro­nom­i­cal freight rates that we saw out of Chi­na from Mi­a­mi. So that’s the first thing that we no­ticed in the midst of this on­com­ing chal­lenge that we are faced with,” said Tele­maque.

“This would make what hap­pened out of Chi­na look like child’s play if it is ac­tu­al­ly im­ple­ment­ed,” he said,” It is go­ing to be way more dras­tic.”

Tele­maque not­ed that there would like­ly be a sig­nif­i­cant re­duc­tion in port calls, as it had been in COVID, with the stock be­ing af­fect­ed as a re­sult.

He said, “It is easy to see that if the freight rates go up, if the cost of go­ing in­to ports be­comes as oner­ous as it seems that ves­sels are go­ing to start con­sol­i­dat­ing as they did with COVID. And as they do that, we are go­ing to have re­duced ves­sel calls. Re­duced ves­sel calls mean less calls in­to ports. Ports de­pend on calls for rev­enue so there is go­ing to be an im­pact on our ports in terms of rev­enue gen­er­a­tion,” Tele­maque said.

CP­SO chair­man Ger­vase Warn­er al­so ex­plained the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of these mea­sures on Caribbean trade, as it sig­nalled sig­nif­i­cant in­creas­es in port charges.

He said, “The im­pli­ca­tions for that, ac­cord­ing to at least our ini­tial es­ti­mates, is a 50 to 60 per cent in­crease in per TCU charge for ship­ping goods in­to and out of the Caribbean. As many of our ship­ping lanes do tra­verse through the Unit­ed States, this could have a sig­nif­i­cant and dele­te­ri­ous im­pact on trade for our re­gion.”

As such, Warn­er felt the meet­ing was im­por­tant for var­i­ous pri­vate sec­tor stake­hold­ers to dis­cuss and gal­vanise ini­tia­tives to re­spond to these mea­sures.

He said, “We did want to make sure that as we ad­vance cer­tain po­si­tions, we re­al­ly do feel that we had the weight of the full pri­vate sec­tor through­out Cari­com on our side. We will al­so be en­gag­ing, of course, with the Cari­com Sec­re­tari­at and those con­ver­sa­tions have be­gun.”

Warn­er said the CP­SO has en­gaged with cur­rent Cari­com chair Bar­ba­dos Prime Min­is­ter Mia Mot­t­ley in a bid to pre­vent the im­ple­men­ta­tion of these mea­sures. How­ev­er, Warn­er said the sit­u­a­tion is un­pre­dictable as the Pres­i­dent Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion has made many stances which may be un­favourable.

He said, “As you well know, the Unit­ed States is, un­der this ad­min­is­tra­tion, pur­su­ing a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ini­tia­tives to kind of es­tab­lish it­self in the po­si­tion in which they think that Unit­ed States will be great again.

“So we’ve seen tar­iffs against strong trad­ing part­ners, or tra­di­tion­al trad­ing part­ners like Mex­i­co and Cana­da, where they’ve had a free trade agree­ment. We’ve seen threats to take over the Pana­ma Canal. We’ve seen all sorts of in­ter­est­ing an­nounce­ments. Some of them go in­to ef­fect. Some of them get stayed so we’re deal­ing with great un­cer­tain­ty here.”

While there have been in­stances un­der the Pres­i­dent Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion where cer­tain poli­cies have been put on hold, Warn­er en­cour­aged the meet­ing not to leave it to chance.

He urged, “We can­not take for grant­ed that this is go­ing to pass. And I think that if we are not very clear, and we don’t do our best to avoid this be­ing im­ple­ment­ed with im­pact to us, it will like­ly just hap­pen, and we will be the vic­tims of it all. So it’s re­al­ly im­por­tant for us this af­ter­noon to come to­geth­er and have a dis­cus­sion, and leave this meet­ing with a joint per­spec­tive.”

CP­SO’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Dr Patrick An­toine said Tues­day’s meet­ing, which at­tract­ed more than 300 par­tic­i­pants, was meant to in­form Cari­com’s writ­ten re­sponse, due by March 24. He said this was cru­cial giv­en the US’s in­flu­ence on ship­ping in the re­gion.

He said, “The im­por­tant thing here is that in terms of im­ports, our com­mu­ni­ty, the Cari­com states, we im­port 43.7 per cent from the Unit­ed States. So that’s our to­tal im­ports. And it’s im­por­tant be­cause there is a view by many of you who are in the know, that if we’re go­ing to re­spond, we have to re­spond to this, ba­si­cal­ly recog­nis­ing that we need to demon­strate that there’s sort of meat in what we’re go­ing to re­quest for the Unit­ed States and for its traders.”

He con­tin­ued, “The US is our largest trad­ing part­ner. We’ve giv­en you da­ta for agri­cul­ture and non-agri­cul­ture. So this is sig­nif­i­cant as you start look­ing at the prod­ucts, at the bulk prod­ucts, at the fi­nal prod­ucts, at the in­ter­me­di­ate prod­ucts, at the raw ma­te­ri­als that we im­port from the US and that we ex­port to the Unit­ed States. And all of this shows is that it builds on what was said by Mr Tele­maque, which is that we are high­ly in­te­grat­ed.”

Ari­ma May­or Bal­li­ram Ma­haraj ac­knowl­edged the sit­u­a­tion re­quired a del­i­cate ap­proach giv­en the trade re­la­tion­ship the re­gion shared with the Unit­ed States. He said while it was im­por­tant for Cari­com to be firm, it al­so need­ed to be mea­sured in its ap­proach and con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mak­ing a deal with the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion.