Freight costs in the Caribbean run almost four times the global average, Dr Curtis Dennie, Maritime Specialist, Secretariat CARICOM, told delegates at TOC Americas in Cartagena.
“That’s a challenge,” Curtis said. Geopolitical shifts, rising tariffs and freight surcharges, what carriers call GRI, or general rate increase, have added further pressure, he said, exposing the vulnerabilities of a region he described as the second most disaster-prone in the world.
Ocean transport carries “90% of our imports,” Curtis said, tying port efficiency directly to the price of goods on supermarket shelves. The region is “importing almost 78% of our food, especially from North America,” he said, a dependency CARICOM’s 2025 food security strategy is meant to reduce.
Larger vessels are now calling at Caribbean ports, Curtis said, straining infrastructure built, in many cases, for an earlier era of bulk cargo rather than containers. He said the region needed investment in port modernisation, digitalisation and human capital to keep pace.
The region’s Maritime Connectivity Index has fallen over the past 15 years, Curtis said, as consolidation among carriers has left fewer lines calling directly and pushed more cargo through hub-and-spoke feeder networks. The World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index places the Caribbean’s connectivity ratio among the lowest globally, he said.
Alexander Gumbs, chief executive officer of the Port of St. Maarten said the pattern plays out acutely on smaller islands with no industrial base of their own. “There is no manufacturing industry, there is no real manufacturing,” he said. “So they’re highly reliant on the import of goods.”
Gumbs cautioned against treating the region as uniform, however. Asked to reflect on the Caribbean’s common needs, he said the assumption that every destination faces the same challenges was “one of the furthest things from the truth.” St. Maarten, he said, depends heavily on imported skilled labour and faces the added disruption of the Caribbean’s annual hurricane season, with vendor relationships often the difference between a quick repair and months of delay.
CARICOM’s response, Curtis said, includes a regional ferry initiative, mandated by heads of government meeting in St. Lucia last July, intended to move people, agricultural products and food between islands that currently have no direct shipping connection. He argued the region did not need further research to justify the work.
“We don’t need another study in the Caribbean,” Curtis said. “The solutions are there.”