PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Ramps Lo­gis­tics CEO Shaun Ram­per­sad is urg­ing greater in­vest­ment in sus­tain­able port in­fra­struc­ture across the Caribbean.

Ram­per­sad was speak­ing at Day 2 of the In­ter­na­tion­al Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum for Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean host­ed by CAF – De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean in Pana­ma on Thurs­day.

The Ramps CEO not­ed that be­cause of the lim­it­ed fa­cil­i­ties at most Caribbean ports, in­ter-re­gion­al trade was more cost­ly than trade to the Unit­ed States.

“In the Caribbean, we have two ma­jor chal­lenges. One is that even though our ports are al­ready small, the vol­ume of in­ter-re­gion­al or in­tra-coun­try trade that takes place is very, very slow, very, very low. It cost me more mon­ey to ship a cu­bic me­tre of car­go from Mi­a­mi to Bar­ba­dos than it does from Trinidad to Bar­ba­dos, even though the dis­tance from Trinidad to Bar­ba­dos is 1/10th the dis­tance from Mi­a­mi, be­cause the in­fra­struc­ture be­tween the is­lands of the Caribbean does not ex­ist to re­al­ly fos­ter that type of eco­nom­ic trade,” said Ram­per­sad.

He, how­ev­er, recog­nised that there was bet­ter in­fra­struc­ture in place to ac­com­mo­date cruise lines, but this al­so posed a chal­lenge for small­er Caribbean coun­tries.

“If you look at the num­ber of pas­sen­gers that pass through Caribbean ports, it is mas­sive. This morn­ing, Gas­ton Browne, Prime Min­is­ter of An­tigua, spoke in the main hall. If you take an is­land like An­tigua, you take an is­land like St Lu­cia, if two Roy­al Caribbean cruise ships come in­to port, they take more pow­er than the en­tire coun­try takes with those two ships. When these guys come in­to port, they are burn­ing diesel. They are burn­ing fu­el oil,” said Ram­per­sad.

“There’s mas­sive op­por­tu­ni­ty to de­car­bonise the cruise ship in­dus­try in the Caribbean, but in or­der to do that, in­vest­ment is re­quired on shore-side elec­tric­i­ty. Where does it come from? How can we scale that up so that when the cruise ships come in, we are able to give them shore elec­tric­i­ty from green sources, but at the same time, how do the peo­ple in the Caribbean ben­e­fit from that? Be­cause we put these prod­ucts in, can we re­duce the cost of elec­tric­i­ty? And I think that’s an im­por­tant con­sid­er­a­tion to think about when we think about ports.”

Ram­per­sad said that many coun­tries in Latin Amer­i­ca al­so over­looked the en­er­gy in­dus­tries present in Cari­com states like Trinidad and To­ba­go and Guyana, when propos­ing plans for the re­gion.

“A lot of peo­ple don’t un­der­stand what is go­ing on in places like Trinidad and Guyana and the size and the scale of the en­er­gy in­dus­try,” said Ram­per­sad, “Trinidad is the largest pro­duc­er of methanol and am­mo­nia in the world. How does that play a part in de­car­bon­is­ing ports? Is there an op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring hy­dro­gen in if we think about gen­er­at­ing pow­er for the cruise ports? Can that pow­er come from methanol? Can it come from am­mo­nia? Does that make it green­er? And does that mean that every­body who lives in the Caribbean, the peo­ple who use the port, the car­go own­ers, the ship own­ers, but most im­por­tant­ly, the peo­ple who live there, can they have a bet­ter qual­i­ty of life?”

In his clos­ing re­marks, Ram­per­sad fur­ther called for great in­volve­ment by the pri­vate sec­tor via pub­lic pri­vate part­ner­ships in the in­ter­est of im­prov­ing the qual­i­ty of life of peo­ple in the re­gion.