Sir Ronald Sanders is a business executive and former Caribbean diplomat who publishes widely on Small States in the global community. Reponses to: ronaldsanders29@hotmail.com

If similar terms and benefits apply to the Caribbean as they do to Africa, the countries of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) could address the problems of air and sea transportation that have been an obstacle to more trade between them particularly for agricultural goods.

It would also considerably enhance the benefits to CARICOM producers in the single market which was launched by six Caribbean territories on January 30.

On February 9th, a Memorandum of Understanding establishing a EU-Africa Infrastructure Partnership Trust Fund was signed in Brussels by EU Commissioner Louis Michel and European Investment Bank (EIB) President Philippe Maystadt.

According to a press statement: “This initiative will provide EU financial support for trans-border infrastructure projects that link African countries and regions and close gaps in regional infrastructure networks. The focus will be on projects in the energy, water, transport and communications sectors”.

The arrangement envisages that “during a first phase (2006-07), the EU-Africa Infrastructure Partnership Trust Fund will benefit from 60 million Euros in European Commission grants, primarily for interest rate subsidies on an anticipated 220 to 260 million Euros of EIB lending”.

EU grant funds are expected to play the role of catalyst for projects with demonstrable economic returns to Africa, but where the prospects for high financial returns are less certain and/or where the risks involved are perceived as an issue. Synergies will be further enhanced by the possibility of participation by national development finance institutions in EU Member States.

The second phase, from 2008 onwards, should benefit from substantially increased EU grant resources. The EU has invited other donor countries to contribute to the Trust to help Africa accelerate its infrastructural requirements including transportation.

In CARICOM, it is well known, as the CARICOM Secretariat put it in a publication entitled, “Our Caribbean Community”, that “for the single market to operate effectively there must be safe, adequate and affordable transportation for goods and people”.

Fourteen years ago, the West Indian Commission, in its seminal report to CARICOM governments on the way forward for Caribbean development, emphasised the strategic significance of air and sea transportation for sustaining integration.

The report said: “West Indian integration would wither on the vine and die without adequate sea and air transportation services”. The Commissioners were keenly aware that CARICOM’s six million people (fourteen million if Haiti is included) are scattered over several countries stretching from Central America through the Caribbean to South America with no contiguous boundaries between them.

Unlike Europe, North America and Africa where goods and people in a single market can be moved by road and rail, the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) is wholly dependent on air and sea transportation.

In Chapter Six of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas which established CARICOM and now includes the single market, governments set out a transport policy whose goal, they said, shall be the provision of “internationally competitive transport services for the development and consolidation of the CSME”.

There is, therefore, both a context and legal framework to encourage competitive investment in air and sea transportation within the single market.

The problem with all this is that it exists on paper. And, it urgently needs to be translated into action if the single market is to deliver benefits to the producers of goods, particularly agricultural commodities, within CARICOM.

It may be argued that, notwithstanding the significant financial problems presently being faced by three publicly owned airlines in CARICOM which service parts of the region, the transportation of people within the region is reasonably adequate. Although, even for this purpose, air transportation between two countries - Belize and the Bahamas – and the rest of CARICOM, is extremely poor.

But, both sea and air transportation for the movement of goods, especially agricultural products, is simply abysmal. Yet, if farmers in Belize, Guyana, St Lucia, St Vincent and Dominica – the main agriculturally based economies in CARICOM – are to derive real benefits from the single market, the problem of transportation must be addressed.

In the absence of suitable aircraft and shipping vessels and port facilities to off-load produce, St Lucia and St Vincent bananas, for example, will not reach the tables of homes and hotels in the Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, St Kitts-Nevis and Grenada.

The beneficiaries will continue to be agricultural producers in the US and Central America whose products are imported through Miami.

Better transportation arrangements are also necessary for goods manufactured in the Caribbean.

The EU-Africa Trust Fund offers opportunities for private sector access to funding to establish effective transportation, and any similar arrangement that CARICOM countries might negotiate should equally provide opportunities for private sector participation.

Undoubtedly, if the EU is to take seriously a request from CARICOM countries for a facility as now exists for Africa, the European Commission will want to be satisfied that CARICOM states will implement the terms of the single market.

This will include liberalisation and competition to ensure cost efficiencies and effectiveness. It is a requirement that should be happily met.

CARICOM countries should urgently examine the EU-Africa facility as an effective funding instrument for their air and sea transportation needs.