ABSTRACT
The oil industry is the engine of the economy of Trinidad and Tobago, with a production of around 125,000 barrels of oil a day, of which 55,000 come from offshore on the east coast and 31,000 from the west coast of Trinidad. Two refineries with total capacity of 230,000 barrels a day are located along the west coast of Trinidad.
For these local oil operations an average of 50 and 800 tankers, annually, visit ports on the east and west coast, respectively. The daily crude tonnage of tankers passing through the south Caribbean now exceeds 2 million metric tons (t). Tanker traffic, therefore, creates a major risk for oil spills and complicates contingency planning in Trinidad and Tobago, and the southern Caribbean.
Small island states with serious deficiencies in financing their contingency plans can utilize tiered emergency response schemes to offset the obvious weaknesses in their response capabilities; but unless multilateral funding is available, the benefits of tiered response would be limited. Assistance to small island states to help ratify the IMO conventions and protocols remains the best form of insurance against all oil spill perils.
“We used to get food from the garden.” understanding changing practices of local food production and consumption in small island states
