A blood sam­ple was shipped in­to this coun­try that need­ed to be tak­en to a lab­o­ra­to­ry ur­gent­ly for test­ing.

How­ev­er, be­cause of the cur­rent de­lays be­ing ex­pe­ri­enced to clear shipped items, that sam­ple will most like­ly go bad.

The time frame for the clear­ance of items is now six days on av­er­age.

Pre­vi­ous­ly items were cleared the same day.

This is an ex­am­ple of the "chaos" cur­rent­ly be­ing faced in this coun­try for per­sons try­ing to ship in items, An­drea Davis the coun­try man­ag­er for DHL said yes­ter­day.

But the sit­u­a­tion is not on­ly af­fect­ing in­di­vid­u­als but al­so small and large busi­ness­es and even em­bassies.

Davis was among sev­er­al of this coun­try's cham­bers, busi­ness as­so­ci­a­tions and lo­gis­tics com­pa­nies that came to­geth­er yes­ter­day to call on the gov­ern­ment to im­me­di­ate­ly re­scind the sys­tem cur­rent­ly in place to clear items shipped in­to this coun­try as they say it is "ex­treme­ly de­bil­i­tat­ing".

Davis said DHL does rough­ly around 700 ship­ments dai­ly and 90 per cent of them are cur­rent­ly be­ing bond­ed.

DHL is one of sev­er­al couri­er com­pa­nies op­er­at­ing here.

"When you have some­body who is go­ing in­to surgery for a stent and that stent comes in and that stent is US$100 and the man can­not have that surgery on a Thurs­day and the spe­cial­ist flies out or they have no oth­er op­er­at­ing time the next week what hap­pens then?" eZone CEO Paul Pan­tin said.

Pan­tin said the de­lays could be cost­ing US$50,000 a day.

"Far from fa­cil­i­tat­ing le­git­i­mate trade what is hap­pen­ing now is frus­trat­ing le­git­i­mate trade and it must be re­versed if the coun­try, which is try­ing to get out of a re­ces­sion, is to have a chance to do so by al­low­ing busi­ness to do what busi­ness needs to do," chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Amer­i­can Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce Ni­rad Tewarie said yes­ter­day.

Yes­ter­day's meet­ing was held at AM­CHAM's head of­fice on Mar­aval Road in Port-of-Spain and in­clud­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce, and the Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion among oth­ers.

Tewarie said in 2011 the then min­is­ter of fi­nance in a bud­get state­ment recog­nis­ing the in­ef­fi­cien­cy at the air­port and ease of do­ing busi­ness and recog­nis­ing the growth of the lo­gis­tics in­dus­try pack­ages un­der $20,000 for com­mer­cial and in­di­vid­ual use would not re­quire bond­ing.

In 2018 Cus­toms and Ex­cise said be­cause there was no change in the law this prac­tice was not le­gal and need­ed to be fixed.

As a re­sult Cus­toms start­ed im­ple­ment­ing new mea­sures to deal with this sit­u­a­tion.

"It is caus­ing a sig­nif­i­cant dis­rup­tion in busi­ness op­er­a­tions," Tewarie said.

Tewarie said a big part of cus­toms man­date is to fa­cil­i­tate le­git­i­mate trade and not just to col­lect rev­enue and sup­port the bor­ders.

"What we would like to see hap­pen now is an im­me­di­ate re­ver­sion to the old sys­tem, and we are will­ing to work with cus­toms to im­ple­ment the new sys­tem in an ef­fi­cient man­ner. That's Op­tion A. Op­tion B which to us is more de­sir­able be­cause it is just makes more sense is that we re­vert to the old sys­tem im­me­di­ate­ly and the gov­ern­ment changes the law to al­low for the items val­ued at less than $20,000 to come in as they were pre­vi­ous­ly," he said.

Tewarie said this was the first time un­der his tenure as AM­CHAM CEO the groups came to­geth­er in this man­ner.

"This is not our style, we do not like do­ing things like this. We be­lieve in di­a­logue and col­lab­o­ra­tion to find so­lu­tions but the sit­u­a­tion fac­ing us at the air­port and by us I mean the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty in par­tic­u­lar but it is start­ing to spill over to af­fect in­di­vid­u­als now is in­creas­ing­ly se­vere at a time when we can­not af­ford it," he said.

Aboud said the sit­u­a­tion cur­rent­ly fac­ing the coun­ty with the ship­ping in of items is "worse than the coro­n­avirus".

"I would like to say that prob­a­bly the most re­spect­ful way I can re­fer to this is as a wild, mad stunt, and the rea­son I can say that with some sense of con­fi­dence about the char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of this as a stunt is that this has ac­tu­al­ly been done with ze­ro in­ter­ac­tion or con­sid­er­a­tion for the de­struc­tion of con­fi­dence and the road­block that it cre­ates," Aboud said.

TTMA Di­rec­tor Dale Par­sons, FedEx Op­er­a­tions Man­ag­er Shameel Man­dol and FedEx Coun­try Man­ag­er Stephen De­Fre­itas al­so at­tend­ed yes­ter­day's meet­ing.

T&T Cham­ber CEO Gabriel Faria was un­able to at­tend yes­ter­day's meet­ing but sent a mes­sage voic­ing his sup­port.