After Irma, a different storm threatens the island way of life
When the Prince of Wales flew over the tiny Caribbean island of Barbuda in the wake of Hurricane Irma, what he saw was, he said, “painful beyond words”. Where once he would have seen a jumble of corrugated metal roofs, below was just a mass of blue tarpaulin and debris.
But the islanders’ problems were far from over: the devastation has mired the island in a land dispute involving colonial independence and multimillion pound developments – one backed by Robert de Niro, the actor, and James Packer, the Australian billionaire. The future of one of the Caribbean’s last remaining undeveloped islands is uncertain.
Antigua and Barbuda are vastly different, forced together at independence from Britain in 1981. Antigua is a small, mountainous, highly developed tourist destination replete with a cruise port, high-end
resorts and colonial-era world heritage. It has a population of 80,000 and 16 MPS in the joint national parliament.
Barbuda is pan flat, two thirds the size of Antigua and relatively undeveloped. Its population, before the evacuation when Irma struck, was around 1,700. It has one MP.
The most distinctive feature of Barbuda, however, is its land system. Territory on the island is effectively communal – a result of ambiguities arising from the abolition of slavery in 1833. It is held by the Crown in trust for the people who use it for farming and hunting. Decisions over the land are made democratically, while outsiders are highly restricted in their ability to lease it.
However, that status is disputed and has been almost continuously since independence.
On one side of the argument is the governing Antigua & Barbuda Labour Party and on the other, the political opposition and a grassroots movement on Barbuda staunchly opposed to the government’s plans.
The islands’ Labour Party claims Barbuda is welfare-dependent and in need of development and modernisation. Its opponents claim that the government wants to do away with two centuries of tradition and sell the islanders down the river of mass tourism. Lionel Hurst, the government’s chief of staff, says the land on Barbuda has no status beyond being Crown property. Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister, has publicly called the common land concept a “myth”.
Mr Hurst says the only sizeable employer there is the local council, with 400-600 workers – 200 of them cleaners. Funding comes from a government block grant. Mr Hurst believes the island’s financial viability is fragile. In response, the government is promising £275million to fund a new airport, a berth for cruise ships and freight liners, and a new road.
That would go hand in hand with Paradise Found, a £185million resort being developed by de Niro and Mr Packer on the remains of the former K Club – once a favourite haunt of Diana, Princess of Wales – as well as other major resort developments.
While not universal, opposition partly railed against the area leased for Paradise Found, which is much larger than the original K Club, and partly on a remarkably cheap 198-year lease.
‘Barbuda has immense potential and that potential must be realised in the interests of the Barbudan people’
Some claimed the people of Barbuda had not been properly consulted.
A law passed to formalise the deal in 2015 is now under legal challenge.
Since Irma, however, things have taken on a nastier tone. The storm devastated the island, and with a second tempest bearing down on it, its entire population was evacuated to Antigua. Added to the land dispute was now the question of how to rebuild the island. In response, the government doubled down on its push for development.
Most controversially, it passed a law earlier this month amending the 2007 Barbuda Land Act, which enshrined its unique status, allowing islanders to buy freehold plots for a nominal dollar fee. The idea was to fast-track rebuilding by enabling residents to take loans out against their freehold. But it is impossible to disentangle the proposal from the broader development proposals.
At the core is a lack of trust in the government, which the slow rebuilding process has worsened. Eight months after the hurricane, most Barbudans remain on Antigua. The only primary school and day care centre remain derelict, and there are problems with water and electricity.
When a snap election was called for March, the few who had returned to Barbuda had to return to Antigua to vote. But the new law has also allowed the developers of Paradise Found to convert their leasehold into a freehold. Mr Browne told a local radio station last year that “Barbuda has immense potential and that potential must be realised in the interests of the Barbudan people”, adding “you cannot develop an island unless the people have ownership rights”.
The government’s spin is that its goal is for small-scale, high-value, luxury tourism. Mr Hurst talks of guests arriving by private jet. He says: “It will cost $3,000 just to lay your head down for the night”. He also insists that the development will be isolated from Codrington – the only major settlement on the island – and will pose “no danger to the village life of Barbuda”.
However, many opponents don’t believe a word of it. John Mussington, a teacher on Barbuda and co-founder of Barbuda Silent No More, talks of “extractive development”, and of islanders being “tricked” by the $1 freehold into losing control of the island to speculative ventures.
Howard Lovell, the political leader of the Antiguan opposition United Progressive Party, claims the $1 freehold is a “ruse” and that the Labour Party wants to “give away huge portions of Barbuda for little or nothing”.
So deep is the mistrust that the failure to rebuild Codrington quickly is being seen by some as deliberate. Mr Mussington believes that it is convenient for the Barbudans to be stuck on Antigua because the tourist developments “will have a better chance of succeeding”.
Mr Lovell accuses the Labour Party of having a “deeper and more sinister motive”.
But the government points to the economic and social benefits that tourism can bring.
With both sides questioning the motives and legitimacy of the other, the dispute appears intractable. But beyond the rhetoric, it is not obvious that their goals are very different. While much coverage of Barbuda mythologises it as an untouched paradise, the population is not in denial about the need for development.
Trevor Walker, elected in March for the BPM as Barbuda’s only MP, accepts that the economic situation on the island prior to the hurricane was far from ideal, and welcomes the rebuilding of the K Club. But he objects to the increased footprint of Paradise Found and to elements of the agreement which restrict any construction or access to waters within a mile of the resort. He does not share the fears that the island will be up for grabs, but he does suspect that the government wants to apply to Barbuda the same mass tourism model that is evident in Antigua.
There was hope that the devastation the hurricane wrought would bring both sides together and lead to a settlement of the issue. Instead, the opposite has happened.