The Tivoli effect

Sat, June 12, 2010 - 12:00 AM

by TONY BEST

ALTHOUGH BARBADOS and its other Eastern Caribbean neighbours are quite a distance from Jamaica, they will not escape the economic fall-out from the recent social strife in West Kingston, says a highly rated Caribbean security expert.

That warning, of sorts, came from Dr Ivelaw Griffith, who is perhaps the Caribbean's leading security expert.

The problem for Barbados and others in the region, said Griffith, provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs of York College, City University of New York, and a frequent visitor to Barbados, was that the fall-out from the carnage would include the forced diversion of substantial sums of money to meet increased security costs elsewhere in the Caribbean.

At the same time, he said, it would dent the image of Caribbean tourism destinations as idyllic vacation spots and affect their ability to attract more tourists.

"The economic chunk of change is going to have an opportunity cost because the money is going to have to come from someplace else," said Griffith, the author of several books on security in the Caribbean.

"It is going to come from such places as education which should be getting more money, health, housing, and roads which should all be getting more money."

Griffith cautioned that the fall-out might inflict severe damage on the lucrative tourism industry by portraying the region as a violent part of the world.

"Tourism dollars are going to be lost as a result," he asserted. "The countries are also going to be forced to spend more money on marketing to keep the current levels of tourist arrivals."

He sees geography as a contributing factor to the region's problem, meaning that Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Antigua, the Cayman Islands and others are all in the Caribbean.

"When people think of Jamaica, they are not only thinking of Jamaica the island but they think of Jamaica in a region called the Caribbean.

"What I suspect is likely to happen is . . . . there is going to be a correlation between Jamaica place and Caribbean place," was the way he put it.

But Griffith was quick to point out that even before the recent turmoil in Jamaica, the image of several Caribbean destinations was suffering as a result of an upsurge in crime, especially homicides.

In a 2007 report, the World Bank stated that the Caribbean had the world's highest homicide rate of 30 murders for every 100 000 population. So far this year, the number of homicides in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas and St Kitts-Nevis was collectively double New York City's murder rate.

Foreign Policy, a prominent international publication, in an article entitled Jamaica's Coke Rebellion, described Jamaica as "one of the most violent countries on earth," ranking it in the world's top five, behind Colombia, South Africa and a "rotating list of central American narco-states" in annual homicide indices.