Tourism can unite Caribbean – Bartlett

JAMAICA’S TOURISM Minister Edmund Bartlett believes tourism has enormous potential to promote Caribbean regional integration.

Addressing the 54th annual general meeting of the St Lucia Hotel & Tourism Association at Harbour Club St Lucia last month, Bartlett stated that the tourism sector promotes some of the main values of regional integration as the industry “involves the close contact and interaction of millions of individuals from diverse cultural, ethnic, racial, socio-economic and national backgrounds working together for mutually beneficial exchanges”.

Describing tourism in the Caribbean as “cutting across many spheres, sectors and boundaries”, Bartlett characterised the sector as “a shared model of development for the region”, and one that shares a special place among Caribbean states.

“The sector ... provides considerable scope for collaboration and cooperation among many stakeholders at the regional level in a wide range of areas, including investment and product development, human resource development, tourism awareness, research and statistics, access and transportation, regional facilitation, environmental and cultural sustainability, marketing communications and addressing crime that involves visitors,” the minister stated.

Affirming that the Caribbean is the most tourism-dependent region in the world, generating investments and jobs and supporting overall economic growth through critical sectoral linkages, Bartlett reported that Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders attending the 29th Inter-Sessional Heads of Government meeting in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in February had acknowledged tourism as the Caribbean’s largest economic sector and declared that it needs to be “stimulated urgently and sustainably for the region’s long-term development prospects”.

Tourism, he said, was also a catalyst for promoting the successful implementation of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy framework, which has been the leading initiative developed by CARICOM to promote regional integration.

PRACTICAL APPROACH

Tourism could also become a catalyst for increased intra-regional travel, which could spread its benefits across the Caribbean, Bartlett posited. “Intra-regional tourism provides vast economic exchange and opportunities for the regional economy that would have otherwise gone to countries such as the USA, Canada and England. This form of inward-looking tourism is also a very practical approach to reversing the overdependence of the region’s tourism sector on international markets,” Bartlett added.

Citing the recent signing of the Multilateral Air Services Agreement by CARICOM Heads as one of the region’s noted successes in the promotion of intra-regional tourism, Bartlett said this could help to make travel within and beyond the Caribbean much easier.

Bartlett acknowledged that there are a number of obstacles that must be overcome in the quest to establish a sustainable regional tourism sector. They include the general lack of emphasis and promotion of intra-regional tourism at national levels; the prohibitive cost of intra-regional travel; continued restrictions to free movement and insufficient harmonisation and coordination in the area of disaster risk management.

The Caribbean’s vulnerability to climate change constitutes another of the threats to the region’s tourism sector, he stated, stressing that these issues necessitate sophisticated resilience mechanisms and crisis management systems. “Indeed, it was this spirit of regional cooperation that led to the recent conceptualisation of the Caribbean Disaster Resilience Centre, the first of its kind in the region, which will be established at the University of the West Indies, Mona,” he added.