Caribbean · Regional Integration
Friday Named in CARICOM Ferry Pilot That Could Cut the Cost of Moving Goods Through the Grenadines
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley says St. Vincent’s Godwin Friday, Trinidad’s Kamla Persad-Bissessar and herself will trial a Trinidad vessel within months, as the region scrambles to blunt imported inflation.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines has been placed at the centre of one of the most practical regional transport experiments in years, after Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley named Prime Minister Godwin Friday among the leaders who will pilot a Trinidad and Tobago ferry as a proof of concept for a permanent CARICOM cargo service.
Speaking at the closing news conference of the 51st Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM in Saint Lucia on Wednesday, Mottley, who holds the lead responsibility for the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME), described the effort in blunt terms.
The major, major initiative that we want to be able to do is to reduce the cost of cargo for intra-island trade. Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados
The plan runs on two tracks. A permanent, privately operated ferry remains the long-term goal, but Mottley cautioned that sourcing suitable vessels and completing the regulatory groundwork could take as long as a year. In the meantime, Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has agreed to make one of her country’s existing ferries available as an interim proof of concept, which Mottley said the region hopes to stand up within the next three months.
“Trinidad and Tobago has had a history of using ferries between Trinidad and Tobago. I think you have five ferries, and we are now about to enter discussions,” Mottley said, before naming the small working group that will take it forward.
“We are now about to enter discussions, Prime Minister Friday from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and myself as lead on CSME, to see how best we can utilise one of the Trinidad vessels as a proof of concept while the private sector procures.”
Why Friday’s presence matters
For most CARICOM members, cheaper inter-island freight is an economic convenience. For St. Vincent and the Grenadines, it is closer to a structural necessity. This is a multi-island state whose economy depends on moving goods across water every single day, from the mainland out to Bequia, Canouan, Mustique and Union Island, and back again. Every case of imported goods that lands at a Grenadines wharf has already absorbed the cost of ocean freight before a Vincentian vendor marks it up.
That is precisely the cost Mottley says the initiative is designed to attack. The Barbados leader framed the ferry not as a tourism perk but as an inflation tool, sitting alongside efforts to lower the cost of freight, gas and electricity across the bloc.
What it could mean for the Grenadines
A working regional roll-on, roll-off cargo service would let a truck loaded with goods drive onto a vessel in one territory and off in another, cutting the trans-shipment, handling and delay costs that inflate the shelf price of almost everything Vincentians buy.
The mutual recognition of licences and insurance that Mottley has undertaken to negotiate is the unglamorous detail that decides whether this ever works. Get the treaty arrangements right and a Kingstown-based hauler could, in principle, serve customers across the southern and eastern Caribbean. Get them wrong and the ferry sails half-empty.
The mechanics are the hard part, and Mottley did not pretend otherwise. She said she had taken personal responsibility for securing the treaty arrangements for mutual recognition of licences and insurance, so that cargo vehicles “can literally go on and come off where possible.” Governments will also have to assess whether ports need infrastructure upgrades or temporary ramps before any vessel can dock. Tellingly, the trial will begin in the southern and eastern Caribbean, the very sub-region where St. Vincent and the Grenadines sits.
A years-old idea, revived under pressure
The regional ferry is not new. The concept was first advanced in January 2024 under former Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Keith Rowley and has surfaced repeatedly at CARICOM summits without ever carrying its first paying container. What has changed is the pressure. Mottley tied the renewed urgency directly to global instability, warning that imported inflation is squeezing Caribbean households and that events far outside the region’s control keep resetting the clock.
“As you know, last night the fighting has started again, so that is what creates also the uncertainty, but we are committed to shielding our population as far as possible,” she said, referring to renewed hostilities between the United States and Iran that have again pushed up oil prices. For SVG, that link is not abstract. Higher global oil feeds straight into VINLEC’s fuel bill and, ultimately, into the electricity charge on every household and business.
Mottley was careful to manage expectations, casting the whole exercise as collaborative rather than finished. “None of us is omniscient. None of us has all the answers. None of us are omnipotent as well. So we will work together,” she said.
The accountability question
For Vincentians, the value of this announcement will be measured not in communiques but in wharf prices. Prime Minister Friday now has his name attached to a three-leader working group with a stated three-month horizon for the interim vessel. That is a specific, checkable commitment, and it arrives at a moment when the cost of moving goods to and from the Grenadines is already a live local grievance, most recently in the dispute over small vendors and access at the Grenadines Wharf during the Carnival season.
A proof of concept is, by definition, a test rather than a guarantee. But it is also the first version of this idea in which St. Vincent and the Grenadines is named as an active participant rather than a hoped-for future stop. Whether that translates into cheaper cargo for Vincentian traders, or joins the long list of CARICOM initiatives that never left the closing press conference, is now something Kingstown has a direct hand in deciding.
Filed under: Caribbean, Regional, Politics, Business · Tags: CARICOM, CSME, Godwin Friday, Mia Mottley, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, regional ferry, cost of living, Grenadines, cargo