Cautions against ‘downside’ to tourist economy
Retired Commonwealth Secretary General Sir Shridath Ramphal has told Stabroek Business that he believed that the Caribbean had been “seduced” by the short term gains deriving from the economic returns from tourism and has warned that the region must be mindful of its “downside”.
“There is no question that many islands have developed in a real sense on the basis of an enhanced tourist economy. But a tourist economy is a very fragile thing. It has a downside in terms of your nationalism because what you are conveying to the world all the time is a country that is simply a little bit of paradise.”
According to Ramphal while the dependence of hundreds of thousands of Caribbean people on the tourism sector makes it “a laudable pursuit,” the region needed to be concerned that the promotional propaganda associated with selling the tourism product did not change the Caribbean’s perception of itself. “What we have to do is to be on guard that we do not begin to believe our own propaganda and therefore diminish our capacity to engage in struggle in those areas where we must,” Ramphal said.
Meanwhile, the former Guyana Foreign Minister told Stabroek Business that figures reflecting increases in the Gross Domestic Product of Caribbean economies do nothing to conceal the continuing region-wide gap between rich and poor. “Whatever the talk about GDP levels we know that within every society in the Caribbean there are unacceptable pockets and levels of poverty. We have to have those eliminated and we have to do all that we can at the local level and all that is necessary at the international level so that those local efforts can be fulfilling,” Ramphal said.
And Ramphal told Stabroek Business that if the region as a whole is to improve the quality of life at the local level its foreign policy must adopt “a clear-minded view of what needs to be done at the global level.”He said that he feared that the regional diplomatic effort that had done much in the past to help sustain the global debate on the gap between rich and poor had “lost its confidence,” relapsing into “a colonial frustration” resulting from a resignation to the fact that “the rich are always going to be dominant and we are going to have to take what crumbs we can get.”
In an extensive, at times passionate interview Ramphal conceded “frustration and unhappiness” with the quality and outcomes of Caribbean diplomacy.
Asked whether he thought that there had been a slowing down of the energy levels of Caribbean diplomacy he said that he thought that that had in fact been the case. “I don’t think that you can blame the diplomats. It is a consequential slowing down of diplomatic effort deriving from a policy shift at the level of the political directorate of the entire region,” he said.
Asked about his views on where he thought the focus of the Caribbean ought to be in terms of international diplomacy Sir Shridath said that if the Caribbean is to count for anything in the international community it needed to develop much more than “a sense that we matter because we can attract a great many tourists to come and admire pure sea and our sand.”
Meanwhile the former Commonwealth Secretary General said that the Caribbean needed to prepare itself for another fundamental shift in international economic relations. He said that the international community could now look to a world in which the United States will no longer be the world’s sole economic superpower. According to Ramphal China, India and Brazil had emerged as major economic powers that had already begun to feature prominently in international economic relations. “The world is going to look very different and small countries have to have a vision in that post-American world.
It should not be a vision which is built on alienation. We must look at that time with the knowledge that we are part of a hemisphere in which the United States is going to be, forever, a very big player. But there are other big players…and our fate is not going to depend on whether we have a free trade area with America but on what happens in the world economy. Geneva is going to be more important to us than Washington.”