Joshua Seemu­n­gal

Se­nior Re­porter

joshua.seemu­n­gal@guardian.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young says he dis­cussed the is­sue of how pro­posed tar­iffs could af­fect T&T’s ship­ping in­dus­try with US Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio dur­ing bi­lat­er­al talks in Ja­maica on Wednes­day.

He made the com­ment while ad­dress­ing the Ship­ping As­so­ci­a­tion’s 87th Busi­ness Break­fast and An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing at the Port-of-Spain Cruise Ship Com­plex yes­ter­day.

“There are two sets of tar­iffs that could af­fect the Ship­ping As­so­ci­a­tion. There are the tar­iffs that we are hear­ing on goods and ser­vices, which you are see­ing put on by the Unit­ed States on many coun­tries that we trade with, that are go­ing to have a di­rect im­pact on the cost of goods on every sin­gle one of us, not on­ly in Trinidad and To­ba­go, but through­out the Cari­com re­gion. “But the im­por­tant one that we were look­ing at specif­i­cal­ly was the po­ten­tial tar­iffs on ships built in Chi­na and any ship­ping fleet that even has an or­der for a ship to be built in Chi­na and as I told Sec­re­tary Ru­bio, I don’t have the sta­tis­tics but I’ll find it very hard to be­lieve that any glob­al ship­ping fleet does not fall in­to one of those two cat­e­gories. And I made the case for us in T&T, as well as the Cari­com re­gion of how detri­men­tal that would be to our cit­i­zens in this re­gion,” he said.

In a move which US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump hopes will boost the coun­try’s ship­build­ing in­dus­try, the US gov­ern­ment is hold­ing pub­lic hear­ings re­gard­ing in­creas­ing port call fees for Chi­nese-built ves­sels. The fees could be in­creased to as much as US$1.5 mil­lion per port call. Ac­cord­ing to Young, Gov­ern­ment has iden­ti­fied the mar­itime in­dus­try as a key tar­get in its hope to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my. He sought to as­sure the Ship­ping As­so­ci­a­tion’s mem­bers that Gov­ern­ment will back them.

“We are per­fect­ly poised here in T&T to achieve much in the mar­itime in­dus­try. We have nat­ur­al deep har­bours. We have the Gulf, which is a nat­ur­al har­bour for hur­ri­canes be­cause we are south of the hur­ri­cane belt. We are pre­pared to do the bunker­ing for the ef­fi­cien­cy of fu­els go­ing for­ward in the fu­ture be­cause we are pro­duc­ers of LNG, as well as ethanol,” he said. “With in­creas­ing mar­itime trade in the Caribbean, Trinidad and To­ba­go can ex­pand its bunker­ing ser­vices and cater to tran­si­tion­ing ves­sels in its ter­ri­to­r­i­al wa­ters. This will be T&T’s for­eign ser­vice pack­age, in­te­grat­ing bunker­ing, cold stack­ing, ship re­pair and trans­ship­ment ser­vices, mak­ing the coun­try a one-stop hub for mar­itime lo­gis­tics. In­creased bunker­ing ser­vices will in­crease for­eign cur­ren­cy in­flows and cre­ate em­ploy­ment in the in­dus­try,” the PM said.

Min­is­ter Young al­so sought to ad­dress con­tin­ued con­cerns about for­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty in the coun­try. “Un­for­tu­nate­ly, there’s no mag­ic pill to it. What we are go­ing to work on is the al­lo­ca­tion. How do we in­tro­duce a more ef­fi­cient al­lo­ca­tion sys­tem, and to be frank, to as­sist the av­er­age peo­ple, be­cause we un­der­stand every busi­ness wants their share of the al­lo­ca­tion. The ship­ping in­dus­try has a se­ri­ous role to be able to con­tribute,” he said.

Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port Ro­han Sinanan, as well as the Min­is­ter of Trade and In­dus­try Paula Gopee-Scoon were al­so in at­ten­dance.

Port work­ers protest

As the Prime Min­is­ter ex­it­ed the gates of the Cruise Ship Com­plex, how­ev­er, the ve­hi­cle he was in passed a group of sev­en protest­ing port work­ers. Hold­ing plac­ards, they said they turned up as they got word of PM Young’s vis­it.

“It seems as though they are not giv­ing any con­sid­er­a­tion to the port work­ers who have been out here through the pan­dem­ic and for a very long pe­ri­od ful­fill­ing the du­ties of the na­tion. And at this point in time, we see that they give them­selves a great in­crease and they have all the perks…and the work­ing class - who work for every­thing - they want to give them the small­est per­cent­age,” group spokesper­son Khary Gre­goire said.

“We saw every­thing rise. We saw the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance raise gas three times in one year. He laughed and he saw the na­tion not protest­ing all dif­fer­ent kinds of things. We see they promise to fix the roads with the gas, but that nev­er fix. It’s on­ly when com­ing down to the elec­tions when they de­cide to make some pot­holes in­to speed bumps.”

Not­ing that port work­ers last re­ceived a wage in­crease in 2013, he said, “You have to band yah bel­ly and take loans, and the loans and them come back with high pay­ment in­crease.”

Port work­ers at the Port of Port-of-Spain walked off the job in Oc­to­ber 2024, de­mand­ing bet­ter wages and work­ing con­di­tions. A month lat­er, in No­vem­ber 2024, the In­dus­tri­al Court or­dered the work­ers to re­turn to work.