Submitted by Looking Glass
Go back to when America was Virginia and the monument of the Greek Prince, George Washington’s grand-father in St John’s church yard; Barbados has always been a tourist Mecca for the rich and famous, not for the average soul. It was in the 1940s-50s that the West and South Coasts became established as tourist resort areas. It was a ‘natural’ process that required little government spending.
The development of tourism as an industry got started in the Development Decade of the 1960s when banks and agencies, their coffers overflowing, sought investment opportunities in the developing countries (LDCs). The OECD touted tourism as the saving grace for the LDCs, the source from whence all goodness flowed. The World Bank (1972) said it was a more efficient earner of net foreign exchange, the IADB concluded that tourism benefits were not limited to economic considerations. For us it meant a huge investment in infrastructure and indebtedness.
In time hotels sprang up, most catering not to the rich but to the average person. By the late 1970s we were faced with excess capacity. This at a time of world economic prosperity. Many hotels and guest houses have since disappeared but we continue to add accommodation in an unstructured industry. In essence we invested billions in infrastructure to accommodate the low income tourists, but the largest amount of tourist revenue came from and continues to come from the West and North Coasts.
There is an optimal point beyond which benefits decline and diminishing returns set in. We have already passed the optimal point. Tourism in not a linear or exponential growth industry. It involves a number of economic, socio-cultural and psychological components (land, food, population capital, employment, education, culture, stability). Most of the causal influences are not linear and interrelationships among them vary. For the assumed benefits to accrue a significant change in ‘structure’ and policy is needed.
Does tourism result in economic growth and development or the latter from tourism? All things considered the sustained unregulated increase in hotels, villas, condos, tourist arrivals (not cruise ships) and ‘foreign residents’ will not increase economic growth, but will impact negatively. I am not being political, blaming government, or suggesting that we abandon tourism. The die is cast. We have no choice. We have formal political sovereignty but remain prisoners of an international structure we cannot affect, and for which we are partly to blame.
The point is that we need to rationalize tourism to the country not the country to tourism. We have no comparative advantage based on proximity to the North American market. New cheaper and more attractive destinations like Recife are coming on stream. Compensating for comparative disadvantage by lowering accommodation rates has implications for smaller hotels, labour and wages. We need to encourage and accommodate socio-economic policies which would maximize the use of limited resources and satisfy the needs of people.
Land is not a renewable resource. The more land given over to hotels, villas, condos and homes for the rich foreigners the less there is to feed the people. Increases in population and tourist arrivals result in higher import and utilities costs which, among other things, have social and foreign exchange implications. It is doubtful that technology can be utilized to increase the productivity of less land to feed more people. In time rising import and other costs stagnant wages will result in enhanced leakage and social imbalances will threaten socio-political stability.
Some golf courses are required but do we need six or more of them? As was noted in the Kingsland Estates development plan an 18 hole course requires around 3000 gallons of water daily (more in the dry season). Very few of the small number of golf course workers are local. Real benefits accrue to the owners and are insufficient to compensate for lost agriculture.
The growing enclave of largely semi-skilled and unskilled foreigners (expats) working in construction, hotels and security impacts socio-economically and culturally the composition and distribution of the population. Repatriation of part of their salaries/wages constitutes a form of leakage which has income per capita implications. Their demand for food and utilities help to increase the import bill, the cost of living and reduce employment possibilities. The changing colour of workers in this area may well be due to factors other than colour per se. It is much cheaper to employ locals than to import unskilled workers.
That said the enclave appears to be a standalone community separate and socially apart from the wider community. As in the case of one golf course blacks are not welcomed. Creation of separate facilities within the same society for use by a particular group of persons is hardly conducive to social stability.
It is doubtful that sustained, unrestricted hotel/resort expansion, more tourist arrivals and foreign residents will facilitate the kind of economic and social development to which we supposedly aspire.
We need to establish social cost and benefits of tourism. This has important implications for GDP. Tourism covers a cross section of GDP components. And the hotel industry needs to be disaggregated and analysed. The financial data on which to base definitive calculations or income measurement is not readily available.
Creating of a Tourism Department at Cave Hill solves nothing. Some papers, articles, and a couple of ‘location specific’ based doctoral dissertations exist but no textbooks. And we know next to nothing about the integration and interlocking relationships of the component parts of the industry.
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