THE start of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Caribbean Memorandum of Understanding (CMOU) on Port State Control in Guyana this week is no ordinary bureaucratic milestone.
It comes at a time when Guyana’s maritime sector is being transformed in ways few in the region could have envisioned a decade ago and the conference coming at the same time as the CMOU’s 30th anniversary is an appropriate moment to reflect on both progress and responsibility ahead.
The figures speak for themselves. Since 2020, vessel traffic into Guyana has exploded by some 42 per cent, a figure that is not just a reflection of the country’s oil-driven economic boom, but its rise as a logistics gateway for the wider region.
As Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation, Deodat Indar, rightly observed, this growth is “opportunity”, but opportunity that comes with a side order of obligation.
The busier the port, the more to be safeguarded, the more to be examined, the more to be cross-border co-ordinated.
The quieter but more urgent theme of the conference was that obligation. Particular note should be taken of the intervention by Home Affairs Minister, Oneidge Walrond, who argued that port state control “must not only be viewed as a maritime administration function, but as part of a wider national security ecosystem”. This reframes what could have been a technical, back-office issue as a frontline concern.
Narcotics trafficking, Weapons smuggling, Human trafficking; these are not abstractions for a country whose coastline and waterways are increasingly attractive to vessels transiting multiple jurisdictions with scant regard for the lines on a map.
Regional governments would do well to take to heart, not just cheer, the point that criminal networks exploit the very sort of cross-border traffic that economic growth produces.
The welcome acknowledgment from both Indar and Shipping Association of Guyana President, Dr. Komal Singh, that expansion cannot be pursued without environmental and operational guardrails was also well received.
The global maritime industry’s pivot to decarbonise and meet net-zero targets by 2050 is not something for small Caribbean states to watch from the sidelines; it is a regulatory tsunami that will transform shipping costs, vessel standards and trade competitiveness well before the middle of the century arrives. Guyana’s resort to its Low Carbon Development Strategy hints at an understanding of this, but awareness and action are two different things – a difference that the country’s policymakers would do well to keep firmly in mind as port modernization moves forward.
Ultimately, the conference highlights a simple truth that is often lost in the excitement of growth statistics: infrastructure and ambition are meaningless without the corresponding governance to go with it.
The thirty years of work on inspection standards and compliance by the CMOU are there precisely because shipping is an industry where the cost of cutting corners, in safety, in security, in environmental stewardship, is paid not by a single nation, but by the entire connected region. “The pace of change in this industry is not slowing down,” said CMOU Chairman, Michel Amafo.
Guyana stands at a real inflection point. The challenge now is to make sure the regulatory and security architecture is moving at the same pace as the ships already arriving at its ports.