As the weeks pass, it is becoming ever more clear that if the region is to find a viable short to medium-term way out of the recession it needs to have a far clearer long-term understanding of tourism’s place in driving and sustaining future Caribbean economic activity.
Recently I have had the opportunity to consider this with those who are making the future of what is unquestionably now the region’s single most important industry.
Travelling across the region, I have been able to discuss with ministers, officials and hoteliers how they see the future of the tourism economy, how the product might best be positioned internationally, whether it has unique selling points that can make it globally completive and what the policy issues are that require addressing politically if the industry is to return to growth.
Given the region’s dependence on the industry some of the answers I received were worrying.
Despite it playing a now central role in economic development almost everyone I met, including some ministers, complained that tourism is still regarded within most governments and academia as being a second-class industry and in some way connected with servitude rather than service.
A part of the problem, it was suggested, was that many in the industry were seen as self-seeking and disinterested in finding ways that tourism might catalyse national development. This had the consequence that much of the public sector did not see the industry as a fully integrated part of the Caribbean economy and had not yet fully determined in a national and regional context how tourism could be harnessed to create dynamic linkages with public finance, education, agriculture, the environment, foreign policy and almost every aspect of economic activity.
This had facilitated a situation where tourism was seen as an industry to be taxed and regulated and in which the economic role of the visitor was not widely understood. As a consequence tourists were seen by some in government as an unending source of revenue offering seemingly painless opportunities for taxation with little recognition that if this continues, a moment will come soon when the visitor will go to another more competitive destination outside the region.
That these attitudes prevail in so many Caribbean nations has serious implications for Caribbean economic recovery.
Unlike any other industry, tourism has the capacity to rapidly turn around economies. It demonstrably is able to rapidly generate foreign exchange, create employment and support the broader economy. Evidence of this can be seen in the central role tourism played in saving the Cuban economy after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and as Jamaica’s Tourism Minister, Edmund Bartlett recently pointed out, can be seen in the actions of the United States Congress in enacting legislation to promote US tourism on a national basis for the first time ever in order to stimulate national economic growth.
Despite this it is still hard to find more than a handful of politicians who can provide an over-arching national policy perspective on where the industry will be in a decade from now, or a government that might consider a cabinet retreat or regional caucus on a long term, integrated development oriented approach to tourism.
This has meant that there has been no real pressure for high level Caribbean government/private sector encounters on how to stimulate long-term economic growth through tourism, little debate about the industry’s declining global competitiveness and nothing about where the industry will be in a decade from now if global warming quite literally removes the region’s tourism infrastructure.
By extension this has meant there have been virtually no high level encounters on tourism with the international development agencies on the industry’s future place in regional economic development.
Instead, the debate has for the most related to the short term issues of how to fund a regional marketing campaign, the problems of airlift, the problem of the UK’s much criticised Air Passenger Duty, falling visitor arrivals and issues relating to increases in taxation or domestic regulation.
To be fair, some governments, most notably Jamaica, Barbados and the Bahamas, have recognised the centrality of the industry to growth and their respective prime ministers have become active both within and beyond their nations on issues of importance effecting tourism. But this proactive approach is not shared by most of their contemporaries.
The countries in the Caribbean that are managing to grow tourism are busy diversifying their product and markets, they are incentivising increased airlift and are seeking external support with training. They are also finding way to strengthen their nano and indigenous tourism sector and linking the environment to their offering. Others appear to be doing nothing.
In my conversations it became clear that the most serious issue facing Caribbean tourism is competitiveness. Tourism has become a global commodity and an export industry: that is to say one that any nation or entity anywhere could supply and which fundamentally involves the sale overseas of a service delivered in another country.
This is happening as the cost of the Caribbean product is rising inexorably. While there are some wonderful hotels, small and large across the region, much of the regional product suffers in comparison with other destinations where levels of service, cuisine and accommodation offer better value for money.
Caribbean tourism arrivals are down for almost all nations and even in those countries that are experiencing growth, the yield is falling. If competitiveness continues to decline the capacity of the industry to generate growth will diminish.
This is particularly alarming as there are an ever-growing number of tourism industry dependent workers in almost every Caribbean economy outside of the hotels. They are the one-man back street business that mends and sells luggage, the rum shop owner, the farmer and the junior physician who stand to lose if the industry were to go into decline.
That the global economy is slowly recovering is unquestionable. How much governments and the industry understand the opportunity this presents and tourism role in generating future national and regional growth is much less sure.
David Jessop can be contacted at david.jessop@caribbean-council.org.
Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
