There are reasons why Jamaica and much of the Caribbean should not have relied on mass tourism for its economy. For Caribbeans, it’s about their strengths in a world that hasn’t been kind, that still conceals ignoble motivations abetted by post-independence governments that practice concealment as a centerpiece of political parties once in power.
As the founder of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, scholar-historian Eric E. Williams exposed 90 years ago with publication of Capitalism and Slavery, liberty was not the gift of well-meaning abolitionists, who did exist among the English ruling class. Yet their motivations paled alongside a new world of capitalistic reorder. Across the Americas, an unwilling Black mass that had become skilled crafts makers had to accept labor that after first shackling them to work crews now chained them to the machines of industry and turned villages into company stores. (Williams would also shun tourism for Trinidad, a petro-state, while cultivating tourism in Tobago for Trinidadians.)
The shift away from slave labor would continue to rely on extraction but make extraction only more efficient. Sailing ships first gave way to steam steamships powered by coal extracted from mines in North America, Africa and Europe. Later, from oil beneath the sands of a colonized Middle East.
Respect also took hold among the ruling class who extracted language from meaning. Effective leadership became measured by concealment of motives, at first by propaganda, then by bureaucratese, then by PR.
The marketing of mass tourism aligns with these transitions
For good or not, marketing comes to define the places/destinations where we live. Mass-travel shifts according to marketers’ short-term needs to fill airplane seats and hotel rooms. Machinations are always cloaked in the language of jobs, however menial, low-paying and insecure.
Particularly in Jamaica, which suffers weak enforcement of environmental protection, the 12 percent of Jamaicans who are functionally illiterate — assert by some to be an estimate way low – suffer the pulls and jerks of puppet-like manipulation by their own governments as the lash applied in other times for misbehavior. They vote for Tweedledee Tweedledum leaders accustomed to the commissions, contracts, and rake-offs from tax-free concessions for capital investment induced by duty-free imports not supplied by domestic manufactures.
Natural environments yield to man-built structures that go out of style by chain hotel systems that play off their individually dispersed units across continents as needed to meet balance sheets. International agencies determine rules that disadvantage poor countries. Countries subject to their rules spend inordinate time and sums contesting and domestically defending against their strictures.
China’s Belt and Road to the rescue?
An alternative appeared at the turn of the 20th century when Jamaica opted out of the Western model for financing post-colonial modernization for China’s version of a great leap forward. China had been ruined by world war and then blinded by Cultural Revolution. Yet the People’s Republic emerged as a global economy in a mere 20 years after Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping introduced their Four Modernizations of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense. They also allowed for the re-emergence of a powerful yet Party-controlled private sector that would also appeal to the capitalist edge of western economies through their overseas assistance program known as Belt and Road.
But drawing on several sources, as I pointed out in previous postings in this series on Jamaica tourism, the People’s Republic and its agencies did not seek to plunge Jamaica further into debt so much as take control of crucial sectors of the country’s economy: bargaining for ownership of a modernized Port of Kingston, new expressways whose tolls they collected, and land for its own resorts.
As if additionally dazzled by the PRC‘s modernizing of bauxite/alumina in the Cockpit Country, Holness went on a spree of land alienation.
Both major airports were turned over on a majority lease to a Mexican-based airport management company. First Sangster International in Montego Bay in 2003, and then in 2019 Norman Manley International in a more contested concession because Jamaica’s capital airport at Kingston-St. Andrews Parish became less profitable than Sangster, which funneled tourists in and out of the country.
These concessions were made decades after independence in 1962 and beg the question that if independence did not occur with skilled airport management cadres already in place, wouldn’t it have been cheaper and more face-saving to select qualified candidates for overseas training funded by global NGOs possibly brokered by development banks of the region, of the hemisphere or by the World Bank?
At the time of the 2019 transfer, a government spokesman allowed that such concessions come with associated risks, “but these are minimal.” He said, “the Government has a stringent oversight regime in place.”
Resort-style housing for the rich
At Mammee Bay in the parish of St. Ann (Ocho Rios) a PRC agency was given 167 acres with all but 4.4 acres with concession benefits for pampering PRC and other elites with a willingness to have mangroves and upland forests cleared. Almost the entirety will convert to houses, townhouses, apartments, roads, and supporting utilities, replacing forest with “mainly impermeable surface.”
At the public meeting in January this year, a front man for the Chinese development group told a mostly conservation-minded local audience that they “had to” do a high-end, luxury development on that land. Among the amenities planned for the residents of the proposed development are “a clubhouse with a pool, a gym, tennis courts, disability accessibility, parks, birdwatching and walking trails…”
The environmental impact study for the site, surrounded by numerous villages, offered no alternative use for the site except no development at all.
As the poster reveals, almost 1,000 acres will be impacted altogether (pps 87–88 and the Executive Summary).
These holiday concessions that were clustered along the north section of the toll-financed “Beijing Highway” between Kingston and Ocho Rios were pushed through despite intense public opposition over water rights, village removals and habitat destruction in the Roaring River rivershed that supports Dunns River Falls.
Said prominent wildlife biologist Wendy A. Lee, speaking for the conservation NGO Petchary at the hearing [Petchary, named for a night-screaming native bird], ”I submit that as an alternative, they could turn the site into a tangible environmental and cultural asset by developing those amenities for both the people of Jamaica and tourists. Surely this would enhance tourism and provide multiple opportunities for local involvement, with a light environmental footprint?
“In short, they could establish St. Ann’s first protected area for wildlife conservation, nature tourism (wildlife viewing) and non-extractive recreation, in conjunction with preserving the historical heritage of the Great House and environs.”
The EIS states that the socio-economic surveys did not identify the high-income target market for the project, as if this compelled the absurdist conclusion that, “the characterization of the proposed development as a solution to address a long-standing housing need is not applicable.”
Said biologist Lee, “This omission itself should have force the abandonment of the approval ratings for the project. In fact, several participants of the January 11 meeting inquired about the affordability of the houses and were told rather bluntly by the CHEC representative that the houses would not be affordable.”
And so we return to the sordid story of Bahia Principe that would destroy the ecosystem of Pear Tree Bottom, as the north coast continued its land alienation that turned the patrimony foreign.
