The creation and consolidation of a port community that links the public and private sectors and connects all of Latin America is the objective to be addressed by the Latin American and Caribbean Economic System (SELA) at a regional meeting on the subject, Ambassador Clarems Endara, Permanent Secretary of the organization, announced in an interview with EFE.

Endara assured that the VI Latin American and Caribbean Meeting of Logistic Port Communities, to take place from 16 to 18 March in Panama, will enable the exchange of effective experiences to facilitate trade and generate greater regional interconnection.

“We want to open a great forum where these practices, which for many years have allowed certain ports to make their costs and times more effective and achieve transparency in the handling of their own documentation, can be widely disseminated,” he said.

The ambassador stressed that the importance for the member countries of SELA to achieve the “institutionalization” of this port community, which they hope to achieve in three or four months after the meeting, is to improve the times and costs of cargo transportation, as well as to simplify and improve the logistics of the processes in these local systems.

“The importance of this meeting is to start the institutionalization of this community. That is one of the mandates; the second has to do specifically with opening it up to the rest of the possible logistics communities that we have in the region,” he specified

With the latter, Ambassador Endara refers to the experiences in port matters in the Caribbean and Central America, which he hopes can join this “logistics community.”

BEST PRACTICES, BETTER OPPORTUNITIES

The Permanent Secretary assured that this regional connection in port matters, which has been studied and planned since 2014, would not only have an impact on the development of “port cities,” but also on the promotion of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals with which the 25 Member States of SELA must comply.

“The impacts that we want to generate are precisely related to the Sustainable Development Goals concerning the fight against poverty and the improvement of institutional capacity for countries, which will contribute specifically to establishing a regional framework of best practices in order to ensure a clear effectiveness in cargo management,” he added.

Ambassador Endara maintains that, although the objectives are focused on economic development, the final impact will be social, as the ports could become a model that enables the search for ways of development in the populations that surround them.

“What we want to generate is a public-private community with a field of action in which they can share their best practices, focused on improving the efficiency of time and costs, precisely in the field of trade management in the region,” the official explained.

FOR INSTITUTIONALIZATION

SELA's goal is for this mechanism to overcome the bureaucratic and disorganization difficulties that were accentuated with the emergence of COVID-19 in the region.

In this regard, the Permanent Secretary emphasized that it is not possible to come out of the crisis “without learning that we must institutionalize things so that they work autonomously and do not depend on an organization that will vary according to the impulse it gives to the interests of its members.”

Ambassador Endara assured that the logistic port community that is to be developed will have to go through several stages until it is consolidated, starting with its constitution and the creation of its own regulatory statutes, but that it also faces the difficulties of countries that do not have the internal regulations that allow them to participate, as a State, in this type of association.

“We want to lay the foundation stone, i.e. start working on the legal constitution of the community itself. We have an open dialogue with the members of the network so that they can approve a clear road map and establish a public-private partnership,” the Ambassador emphasized.

The Permanent Secretary stressed that SELA's role will be to provide technical assistance to this logistics community so that it can achieve its autonomy, for which it has the support of CAF-development bank of Latin America.

“The purpose of working with CAF is precisely to be able to support, through technical cooperation, the institutionalization of this logistics community. We believe that through prior advice the establishment of this community could be fully autonomous,” he said.