January 2017 | Business View Caribbean

28 29 Canadian Bank Note COMPANY, LIMITED Our customers oversee the complex projects that combine a government’s technology with the day-to-day life of its citizens. We partner with many Caribbean countries to design customized solutions that are backed by unparalleled expertise and a global perspective. Together, we make the world more secure. cbnco.com Where some people see a challenge, we see an opportunity. Currency Border Security Drivers & Vehicles National ID Excise Control Lottery & Gaming The International Airport Development Company Limited throughout the Grenadine islands of Canouan, Bequia, Union, and Mustique. Replacing the E.T. Joshua Airport with the new one at Argyle will finally allow the world’s larger passenger jets to fly directly to St. Vin- cent and the Grenadines,whereas, before the country was hamstrung by a lack of sufficient runway length and parking space. “The E.T. Josh- ua Airport is standing on 63 acres of land,”ex- plains Matthias. “The parking area for planes is about two acres of land. The terminal building has about 20,000 square feet of floor space. At Argyle, the terminal building is 135,000 square feet of space on three floors,andwe have a paved area for parking planes of up to 20 acres.”Most important is the fact that the newrunwayatArgyle will be 9,000 feet long and 150 feet wide,capable of accommodating jets as large as the Boeing 747-400 series. Matthias elucidates the new airport’s potential for significantly growing the country’s tourism industry,which became a necessity when world politics forced it to decrease its former reliance on agriculture. “Up to 1979,we did very well with agriculture, and bananas were the main crop we exported,”he begins. “We sold bananas,mainly to Britain, and the industry hired nearly 50 percent of the labor force in St. Vincent. But, between 1979 and 1992, conditions in the Euro- pean market started changing. The WTO (World Trade Organiza- tion) rules prevented the Eu- ropean Union from continuing to import bananas from former colonies like St. Vincent and the Grenadines on preferential terms. So, as a former British colony,we found that we had to compete in the openmarket with LatinAmerican countries that were able to produce and sell ba- nanas far cheaper thanwe could. So,whilewe could continue to sell, the price that wewere able to sell our bananas for,no longer was remunerative for us. “As the banana industry started declining, the government was forced to find an alternative to bananas, and we recognized that the services sector had some po- tential for us, especially tourism. So,we started trying to build the tourism sector, but we recog- nized that there was a significant constraint in its development. And that constraint was the hassle that tourists had coming to St. Vincent and the Grena- dines, because in order to get, for example, fromMiami to St. Vincent, you were likely to take a jet like a 3019 or a 757. But that aircraft couldn’t land at the E.T. Joshua–the strip is not long