Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Con­ver­sa­tions have be­gun to con­nect Caribbean cities with fer­ries ac­cord­ing to Port-of-Spain May­or Joel Mar­tinez.

The rev­e­la­tion came dur­ing his open­ing re­marks on Thurs­day at the Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Au­thor­i­ties (CAL­GA) con­fer­ence at the Hilton Trinidad to dis­cuss em­pow­er­ing Caribbean lo­cal gov­ern­ments for sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment as he slammed the way trav­el works with­in the Caribbean.

He de­scribed the air trans­port sys­tem as poor and the sea trans­port sys­tem as “poor­er.”

“I’m sure to get to Trinidad some of you couldn’t get a di­rect flight...some of you may have had to go to Mi­a­mi and come down to Port of Spain,” he told re­gion­al lo­cal gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives in at­ten­dance.

“The Caribbean shouldn’t have to be like that. We sup­posed to be able to trav­el to each oth­er’s is­lands fre­quent­ly in a nor­mal way. Why is that hap­pen­ing to us?”

He said this is hin­der­ing the re­gion’s abil­i­ty to in­te­grate “as well as we could.”

It’s why he said con­ver­sa­tions be­gan at a C40 Sum­mit last year to de­vel­op a net­work with Caribbean cities to help boost in­te­gra­tion. He said this dis­cus­sion in­clud­ed may­ors in Be­lize, Ja­maica, Guyana, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, the May­or of San Fer­nan­do and him­self.

“We put a two-point pro­pos­al com­pris­ing of city lead­ers, co­or­di­nat­ing a so­cio-eco­nom­ic in­te­gra­tion, cre­at­ing an ease of ac­cess for net­work­ing be­tween Caribbean cities, es­tab­lish­ing a con­nec­tion among ter­ri­to­ries through a new, low-cost net­work of fer­ry line des­ti­na­tions en­com­pass­ing all cities of the com­mu­ni­ty,” he said.

Al­so in­volved in the dis­cus­sion, he said, is the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) pres­i­dent.

“What we have done is start­ed the con­ver­sa­tion. We don’t know whether it is fea­si­ble, or whether it can fly. But at the same time, why not try? So we need all the Caribbean cities to come to­geth­er to be able to think about it so I’m go­ing to put the pro­pos­al that we have made to the chair­man of CAL­GA so we can look at it from an as­so­cia­tive po­si­tion and see how we can start in­te­grat­ing,” he said.

He said such a ser­vice and in­te­gra­tion will ben­e­fit coun­tries with­in the net­work.

“Think about this. If I can sail from Trinidad to Grena­da, take my car on a fer­ry. I will still have to take ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion, I’ll still have to buy food and I will still have to en­joy the spoils of Grena­da. Grena­da can have a fer­ry ser­vice that can go to St Vin­cent. St Vin­cent can have one that goes to Bar­ba­dos...the thing about it is we can find ways of con­nect­ing each oth­er but it’s the move­ment of peo­ple en­cour­ag­ing us to work to­geth­er, hang out to­geth­er, en­joy...and build the economies of Caribbean is­lands.”