The Airport Built Without a Bank
Until 2017 nobody could fly to Saint Vincent from outside the Caribbean, because the runway was 1,400 metres of tarmac wedged between a hillside and the sea. The replacement took twelve years and was financed without a loan from the IMF, the World Bank or the Caribbean Development Bank.
E. T. Joshua Airport sat at Arnos Vale, just outside Kingstown, with a runway of about 1,400 metres pinched between a hillside at one end and the sea at the other. It took turboprops and nothing else, and for most operators it took them in daylight only. The practical effect was that Saint Vincent could not be reached from outside the region at all. You flew to Barbados, Saint Lucia, Trinidad or Grenada, transferred to a nineteen-seat aircraft, usually on a second ticket with no through-baggage agreement, and hoped your case arrived on the same day you did.
That single constraint shaped the economy. Saint Vincent got yachts, which arrive under their own power, and it got bananas, which leave by ship. What it did not get was the volume of visitors its neighbours were counting, because the last leg was expensive, unreliable and put off the kind of traveller who books a package. On 8 August 2005 the prime minister, Ralph Gonsalves, announced that the country would build a new international airport on the windward coast at Argyle. The unusual part was not the runway. It was how he proposed to pay for it.
The coalition of the willing
That was Gonsalves's own phrase for the financing model, and it meant exactly what it sounds like: instead of going to a multilateral lender and accepting the conditions, the government went round the world asking governments for money, materials and people. Venezuela was the largest contributor, through the ALBA and PetroCaribe relationship that was then flush with oil revenue, and put in cash, fuel and heavy equipment. Cuba supplied technical personnel — surveyors and engineers who worked alongside Vincentians for years. Taiwan, which Saint Vincent has recognised instead of Beijing since 1981, lent. Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Austria and Libya each contributed something. The rest came from the sale of state land. There was no IMF programme attached, no World Bank project loan and no Caribbean Development Bank facility for the airport itself.
What the ground cost
Argyle is on the Atlantic side because the leeward coast has no flat land whatsoever, and the Atlantic side did not have much either. The site was a valley with hills at both ends and a river running through it. The hills were cut and the spoil used to fill the valley; the Yambou river was rerouted; the families living on the ground were bought out and rehoused, and graves had to be lifted and moved before the earthworks could start. What came out of it was a runway of 9,000 feet — 2,743 metres, long enough for a widebody — on an island twenty-nine kilometres from end to end.
A country of about a hundred and ten thousand people cut two hills into a valley on its windward coast, moved a river, moved the dead, and financed the whole thing by asking governments rather than banks. Whatever else that is, it is not a small ambition.
Twelve years, and the arithmetic
The first completion date given was 2011. Argyle International Airport opened on 14 February 2017. The estimate at announcement was in the region of EC$480 million; the figure usually given at the end is around EC$700 million, roughly US$260 million, against a national output that was well under a billion — close to a third of a year's economy spent on one piece of concrete. The opposition New Democratic Party spent a decade arguing that the money would have done more in health, housing and the leeward road, and that the traffic to fill the runway did not exist. The airport was a central issue at the general election of 9 December 2015, which Gonsalves's Unity Labour Party won by eight seats to seven. E. T. Joshua closed when Argyle opened.
What it turned out to be for
The tourism case was always the thin part. Air Canada began flying from Toronto within the first year and American Airlines from Miami not long after, schedules were cut and restored, the pandemic stopped everything in 2020, and LIAT — the regional carrier Saint Vincent part-owned, and the backbone of eastern Caribbean connectivity — went into administration in July 2020 and took much of the network with it. Arrivals have never justified a 9,000-foot runway on holiday traffic alone. What justified it was something nobody put in the business case. On 9 April 2021 La Soufrière began a fortnight of explosive eruptions and around twenty thousand people were moved out of the north. Argyle sits at the south-eastern corner of the island, well outside the red zone, and it is where the regional relief flights landed and where people left from. On 1 July 2024 Hurricane Beryl went through the southern Grenadines as a Category 4 and stripped Union Island, and Argyle was the hub again.
The honest ledger
The airport did not turn Saint Vincent into Barbados and it was never going to. Set against that, a Vincentian can now fly to Miami or Toronto without buying a second ticket in Bridgetown; perishable produce can leave the island by air; and the state owns an asset that works precisely when the island is in trouble, which for a country with an active volcano at one end and a hurricane track overhead is not a marginal consideration. The debts remain, and they were contracted in an era of concessionary lending that has since closed — Venezuela's capacity to fund anything collapsed with its own economy, and Saint Vincent's recognition of Taiwan is now a standing item in somebody else's diplomacy rather than a reliable source of construction finance.
The interesting thing is the method rather than the balance sheet. A very small state financed a piece of national infrastructure by trading on its diplomatic relationships and its willingness to ask, rather than by accepting the conditions that come attached to a development loan. It got a slower project, a higher final cost and an asset it controls outright. Whether that is independence or simply a different creditor is the argument Vincentians have been having since 2005, and nobody there treats it as settled.