Editorial | Tourism integration 

Editorial | Tourism integration 

Edmund Bartlett’s call this week for collaboration by Caribbean countries to protect their vital tourism industries from global uncertainties again underlines the logic of regional integration. It also puts in the table the status of a more than year-old request by Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders for a study on goods and services that can be feasibly produced in the region.

At the same time, the tourism minister’s reinforcement of the idea of partnerships and intra-regional linkages in Caribbean tourism must also be reflected the planned overhaul of the legislative framework of Jamaica’s tourism sector to, as he said, modernise the industry and create deeper integration with the rest of the economy.

Ultimately, Jamaica, like other Caribbean economies, wants to retain more of the estimated US$4.6 billion that it grosses from tourism.  The Jamaican Government says that around 40 per cent of this money stays in the island. Some analysts believe that the figure is over-stated.

In the event, finding ways to extract more from tourism for domestic economies is the mandate of a new Tourism, Supply-Side Committee, established by the Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO). Mr Bartlett is chairman of that committee, which met Antigua and Barbuda last week.

This push is coming at the time of geopolitical stresses and global economic uncertainties, heightened by the Middle East war, as well as tensions in CARICOM over the direction of the economic integration and functional cooperation and personality strains among leaders.

But Mr Bartlett has repeated his argument of more than a year ago, when he suggested that tourism should be a standing topic on the agenda of CARICOM summits, that the sector can’t any longer be treated as single state endeavours, but as a critical regional resource.  And treated as such.

His committee, Mr Bartlett told Television Jamaica (TVJ), had concluded that “that the wealth of tourism, which relies significantly on the supply side, must be owned, in essence, by the Caribbean people”.

Advancing this goal in the face of global turmoil, Mr Bartlett said, required greater collaboration rather than competition, “to build capacity to withstand these disruptions”.

Earlier, a statement from Mr Bartlett’s ministry said: “Owning and strengthening the tourism supply-side is fundamental to dismantling the long-held perception that tourism is merely an enclave or extractive industry. The Caribbean must position itself not only as a destination for visitors, but as a region that fully captures and retains the wealth generated from tourism within our own economies and communities.”

These are ideas that have long percolated in Jamaica and across the Caribbean, where on average, the tourism retention is estimated at between 15 per cent and 20 per cent of the more than US$20 billion the industry grosses, despite reaching a high of over 50 per cent in the Dominican Republic. Put another way, between 80 and 85 cents of every dollar “earned” by the Caribbean’s tourism sector goes abroad to pay for the goods and services consumed by the industry or repatriated to cover investments costs and profits.  Looked at another way, the linkages and supply chains between tourism and the rest of Caribbean economies are weak, or non-existent, either because they were not formed, or the products needed by the industry are not produced   in domestic markets or are not competitive with imports.

That was the context in which CARICOM’s leaders, at their February 2025 summit, commissioned from the Caribbean Private Sector Organisation (CPSO) and the CARICOM secretariat “a granular study of the linkages between tourism, agriculture, manufacturing, entertainment and cultural sectors in the region”.  

“The study should identify the 20 most important products used by the tourism sector from each of the other sectors with a view to facilitating more and better regional production of these products,” CARICOM said.

Although it was not framed that way, this scheme appeared, on its face, to fall within the community’s advancement of regional industrial policy, the details of which have not yet been widely shared. 

Despite some successes in recent years, there is obviously significant room for improvement, especially in the context of intra-Caribbean production relationships under CARICOM’s still evolving single market regime. However, disagreements in the community, especially over Trinidad and Tobago’s questioning of the value and the viability of the integration and Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar's questioning of the legality of the reappoint of the community’s secretary general, have caused momentum to in an already slow system to decelerate further.

However, as Mr Bartlett’s intervention in tourism highlights, present and emerging crises and mostly larger than is the capacity of any of the small, developing countries in the region to manage adequately on its own. There is value in structured cooperation, which ought not to be detained by personality differences or opportunistic geopolitical alignments.