CARICOM Ferry Trial Turns to a Ship the Region Already Owns

Trade

A CARICOM ferry has been announced, funded on paper, and quietly dropped many times over fifteen years. The announcement itself has become the news.

This week the region’s leaders tried something different. They turned to a ship one of them already owns.

Meeting in Saint Lucia, the heads of government of the Caribbean Community agreed to explore deploying a state-owned Trinidadian vessel on a trial southern Caribbean route. They also ordered a feasibility dossier on ticket prices, freight rates and financial viability.

That is a smaller thing than a launch, and it is deliberately so. The commitment is to test whether a service can pay for itself before anyone buys a ship.

The vessel under discussion is the Galleons Passage, a seventy-four metre catamaran that can roll vehicles on and off. It carries four hundred passengers and sixty cars, and is one of three fast ferries working the sea bridge between Port of Spain and Scarborough.

Why a CARICOM ferry matters to prices in a shop

The Caribbean is fifteen countries scattered across a sea. Almost everything sold in one of them arrives from somewhere else by air or by container ship, and both are expensive for small volumes.

A farmer in Guyana with a truckload of produce and a shopkeeper in Barbados who wants it have no cheap way to meet. Barbados Today notes the limited cargo capacity and high ticket prices of flying within the region.

Mia Mottley, the Barbadian prime minister who leads on the single market portfolio, was blunt about the purpose. Reducing the cost of cargo for trade between the islands, she said, is the major initiative.

She placed it inside a wider fight against imported inflation, alongside efforts on freight, fuel and electricity. Renewed conflict in the Gulf, she noted, has pushed oil prices up again and added fresh uncertainty.

The problem is legal, not maritime

Here is the detail a foreign reader should hold on to. The thing standing between the Caribbean and a working ferry is not a shortage of boats.

Mottley said she is taking personal responsibility for treaty arrangements on mutual recognition of driving licences and insurance. The goal is to let cargo vehicles drive onto a vessel in one country and off it in another, though port ramps and customs clearance need work too.

Fifteen member states, each with its own rules, is the harder engineering problem. A ship can be chartered in a fortnight; a treaty cannot.

It is the maritime version of the barrier the region’s chambers of commerce complain about on land. There the tariff is zero and the paperwork is the wall.

A long record of ferries that never sailed

Scepticism is earned here. A Barbados-based firm, Fast Caribbean, was selected in 2012 to manage a regional ferry service that was intended to start that year, but the service did not sail.

In January 2024, Connect Caribe announced plans for a regional ferry service by the end of 2024, with initial routes linking Barbados, Guyana, Suriname, and other Eastern Caribbean destinations, and said standard fares were expected to be around US$100 roundtrip rather than under US$100 one-way.

Those sailings did not begin either. Barbados Today reports that several timelines have been missed amid struggles over vessel acquisition, port upgrades and customs harmonisation.

Persistent questions remain about how much money governments and investors will actually commit. The unresolved worry, the paper notes, is that the ferry becomes either an expensive niche service or a drain on public finances if the revenue does not arrive.

That risk is exactly what the feasibility dossier is meant to price.

What the CARICOM ferry decision signals

Using an existing state-owned vessel is the tell. It turns a capital-investment problem into an operating question, a far cheaper way to find out whether anybody will actually pay to ship a pallet.

Guyana sits at one end of the proposed first route, and that is not incidental. It is the region’s fastest-growing economy, it produces food the islands import, and it has just started building manufacturing capacity behind cheaper power.

For an investor watching Caribbean integration, the measurable thing is not the summit language but the treaty work. Watch whether mutual recognition of insurance and licences is actually signed in the coming months.

If it is, a fifteen-year failure becomes a route. If it is not, the Galleons Passage will keep running between Trinidad and Tobago, and the region will announce another ferry next year.

Has the CARICOM ferry been approved?

Not fully, because leaders agreed at the Saint Lucia summit only to explore deploying an existing Trinidadian vessel as a proof of concept. They ordered a dossier on feasibility, pricing and financial model, and final approval depends on that assessment.

Which ship would run the trial service?

The Galleons Passage is a seventy-four metre roll-on roll-off catamaran commissioned in 2018. It is operated by the state-owned Trinidad and Tobago Inter-Island Transportation Company, and it holds about four hundred passengers and sixty vehicles.

Why has a regional ferry taken so long?

Vessel acquisition, port infrastructure and customs harmonisation have repeatedly stalled the project, and earlier private ventures missed their launch dates. Leaders now identify the mutual recognition of driving licences and insurance across member states as a central legal obstacle.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ship is being considered for the CARICOM ferry trial, and what are its specifications?

The vessel under consideration is the Galleons Passage, a 74-metre catamaran commissioned in 2018 and owned by Trinidad. It can carry approximately 400 passengers and 60 vehicles.

What route is planned for the trial service, and how long will the trial last?

Early proposals put the first sailings between Guyana and Trinidad, with the southern and eastern Caribbean served first. Mia Mottley estimated the trial period at roughly three months, though private-sector vessel sourcing could take up to a year.

What is identified as the main obstacle to launching a regional ferry service?

CARICOM leaders identified the mutual recognition of licences and insurance as the binding constraint, rather than shipping itself. The region has also seen repeated announcements of ferry ventures since at least 2011 that were subsequently abandoned.