ON TOURISM:
Dr. Wykeham McNeill State Minister in the Ministry of Tourism and Industry: Let me start by saying that we are looking at our tourist industry and the immediate future with a certain degree of cautious optimism.
The months January to August of this year we are down about 6.7 per cent and when you take into account the fact that last year September the events were so devastating that we never imagined, we thought it was going to be much worse. The winter months were very bad, I think we are talking about 13 per cent, but we have had a fairly strong rally. July/August we were up about 5 per cent, I think August was four-point something. So we are coming back. The latter months, October, November, are up obviously because last year was so devastating, so we have had a fairly good rally. Our yields are down because there has been a lot of discounting and this is something that calls for concern. We have just gone through our fall advertising, which seems to have been quite successful and we have put together the plan for the advertising January, February and March.
The new Board was instituted and chairman Dennis Morrison has started off. I think he is doing a good job, certainly working very hard and I think the Board has a blend of experience and enthusiasm and they are very energised at the first meeting, if that's anything to go by, I think we can expect a lot from them.
In other areas in a general sense, cruise shipping, cruise shipping is doing very well. Given all the events that have taken place we are up. This year we hope to hit the million mark, we are just under, still optimistic and next year we are targeting 1.2 million.
Ocho Rios continues to do well and Montego Bay is coming into its own.
On the 21st of next month the Arosa Blue will be coming here, and that one is very interesting to us because it opens up a whole new market. That ship will be home porting as well, which is something that we are really working with and, of course, one of the things that we are really excited about is the whole stake and sale programme, where they fly in from Europe and spend a week in Jamaica and then afterwards go on the cruise and fly back out.
And what is really interesting about programmes like that, is the Condore, for example, has increased its charters and I think they have one a week and I think they move up to either four or five a week to service the ship and this allows additional capacity.
Of course you have the Reggae Marathon. The Reggae Marathon this year has been extremely successful, and I think it's a wonderful thing when we can get these events on an annual calendar. We really want this to be an annual event, it is very successful. This year I think that we have 600 participants and 200 people travelling with them or the other way around, whatever it is.
However, it is, we are expecting 800 people to be coming in and this will be in the first week of December, so you are really out of season and you are bringing the visitors into the island, so doing what an event suppose to do, which is adding an attraction, so we are very excited about it, but as said it is cautious optimism.
Edmund Barlett Member of Parliament: I think that all of us are aware in fact of the difficulties globally that the industry is facing and we have heard that ad nauseam. What we want to be looking at closely now is what is our response. How are we as an industry will be responding to those challenges and what can we really expect for Montego Bay as the gateway of tourism in Jamaica?
Firstly, Minister we are concerned here with regards to just how we look. The state of Montego Bay, the physical surrounding, the environment. Whatever we are marketing and selling is what we are seeing. When we walk around in Montego Bay we don't like what we see.
It's dirty, it's decrepit, it's verminous and unhealthy to say the least, and it's not just Montego Bay. We go along the coast into Ocho Rios, we have pretty much the same problem.
Lee Bailey - Crusie Shipping Executive: The issue of advertising and promotion is essential to tourism and I think that one of the concerns that we have too is, really, what is the plan for the winter season in terms of the marketing? My information, is that as of the of the 1st of December we are going to have a big problem in terms of marketing and advertising. We want to ensure that there is indeed the budgetary support to ensure that the period from December through April will be well covered.
Not only in the normal sense of promotion and advertising, but in relation to what the new realities are. Those two I think are very central and critical.
Godfrey Dyer Chairman of the MoBay Chapter of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association: Wouldn't it be a good idea if we had the Minister of State with responsibility for tourism operating out of Montego Bay?
We are undoubtedly expecting a good winter season and I clarify it by saying a good winter season in numbers, not necessarily in money, because we have been on sale as a destination but we are expecting very good numbers.
There are few things that could affect it, and one of them locally downtown, and I won't even say anymore about it because I think Mr. Bartlett said it well.
A few other things. Crime that we have talked about, if crime is not curtailed and reduced it could be an impediment against us. Another thing that has been happening now, though, Jamaica Public Service problems that is going on, it could become serious if a strike really is put in place.
I think we need to appeal to workers and management to think broadly of the country and of tourism, because there are spin-off effects. If we have power cuts that affect operations within the industry we could have feedbacks as far as the U.S. Embassy and elsewhere and those are things we don't want.
ON AGRICULTURE:
Merrick Gayle (businessman, St. Elizabeth): One of my concerns is that St. Elizabeth is now very heavily developed, which is good, but sadly we are losing a lot of our prime agricultural lands. The reason for this is once a returning resident enter the area and they see a nice piece of land, that is where they want to live and they will buy it at any price. If you look at the development of southern St. Elizabeth, if you take a photograph ten years ago and you go back to that same location and have another photograph and compare both, you would see development.
I have seen that, I have seen photographs in some of the tourism magazines where you stay at Flaggerman and you look down and it's ten years old and when you see the amount of houses there on our prime agricultural land. What I think is happening is that agriculture is really not given the attention it should get in southern St. Elizabeth, and the reason for this is I think that it's a mind set within the people of Kingston and the various ministries, that the people of southern St. Elizabeth and St. Elizabeth on a whole can look after themselves, so don't worry about them, let's worry about the farmer up in St. Mary who is not producing. We have a serious situation. I think as a nation we have to address it, if not St. Elizabeth will no longer be the bread basket.
I am suggesting that we must pay particular attention to planned development. Right now it is beyond control, the reins are loose, the development is faster than we can monitor it, and it is something that must be addressed. We cannot spend money and write a plan for Santa Cruz, which is now being done, Santa Cruz is finished built. We must look at the new growing areas and plan that development. If not, we are going to fall and make the same mistakes that other areas have made.
Simon Browne (business man): Farming still needs a lot of attention but with all the imported stuff it is very hard to compete. We have a cattle farm, it's really tough right now, especially with the land taxes.
With the tourism that we also do we are holding our own, it was down a bit, we are hoping for a better season in the coming year.
I am speaking as a personal small business operator myself, what I would like to see happen is for the Minister of Finance to raise the income tax threshold so that my workers can get a better standard of living. When you pay them $5,000 a week they take home three five. I know that we need to raise more taxes but we need to start targeting people who're evading taxes.
You can look around, and I don't want to single out Montego Bay, however.
ON PRAEDIAL LARCENY
Mark Kerr-Jarrett Presi-dent Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce: Praedial larceny has to be dealt with. I knock down 110 acres of mangoes that I couldn't control.
I lost 60 per cent of the crop. I mean, I had train line out there like little silk caravans coming out of China; they would be trucking down there. You couldn't do anything.
Why can't we put in some legislation where you have to be a registered producer.
If you buy mangoes or you sell mangoes, you are registered, and if you don't have a receipt and you are in possession of some kind of food crop and you are an unregistered producer and you don't have a receipt for it then you and the law are going to have words, but until we take it seriously, we should be feeding ourselves as nation.
The tourist industry is our first line of marketing the local produce in order to penetrate for export, and I don't think we are looking at it seriously, and unlike anything else, agriculture is not determined by world conditions, people have to eat period.
ON THE PRODUCTIVE SECTOR
Martin Hopwood businessman: The policy that we have has to change, both towards agriculture and both the productive sector of Jamaica.
The productive sector is the area of Jamaica that is employing large numbers of people in farms and in factories.
It's being undermined and it's being undermined for the last seven or eight years, and we are feeling the impact, and I am convinced that that is one of the things that is causing a certain amount of crime. I am not saying it is difficult for a man who is a cocaine dealer to get him to start working in a factory from 8:00 in the morning to 5:00 in the evening.
But when he was 15 or 16 years old, before he got to that stage, if you had him in a training institution immediately, and he got him a job on a production line doing something then he would never go in drugs.
But if you allow importers to import everything that Jamaica needs the merchants will get rich and the people at the bottom will get poor.
ON THE WAY FORWARD
Shalman Scott, former mayor and businessman: About proposal for the way forward, conventional wisdom is something that we need to look at. Now, nobody can disagree with the need to grow the productive base of the economy, but what is happening is that you have some persons who because of the drug trade have been accustomed to big money and therefore are not interested when the productive base of the economy is grown and he is offered a job for $5,000 a week, he is not interested in it, and on top of that he does not have the discipline because he was never accustomed to being conditioned into going to work at eight o'clock in the morning, responding to authority and so on.
He does not have the discipline and therefore does not want to be placed in that's kind of psychological strictures.
The same is true also for this business about community. What is it that we are expecting from communities?
The fact of the matter is that the older ones of us in this room who are accustomed to community being a place where people work together and pull together, to a large extent no longer exist, and the police has touched on it in terms of speaking to family on family violence and I, of course, underline that by speaking to the whole business of people competing in these areas for supremacy instead of working together towards a common goal and a common good, and so, therefore, part of 'the way forward' is for us to challenge our very assumptions that we have held for a long time about what is possible, to relook at these, because if we diagnosis wrongly we are going to prescribe wrongly.
ON POLICE RELATIONSHIP WITH DRUG DEALERS
Snr. Supt. Owen Ellington - Commanding Officer for St. James: First of all, I don't know where anyone got the information about policemen having relationship with drug dealers.
As far as I am concerned the only relationship a police ought properly to have with drug dealers is that the police are prosecuting and they are facing prosecution.
Secondly, the issue of drug dealers being in possession of firearms has come up before. I can state categorically that I know of no drug dealer who has been granted a firearm licence in St. James.
I would urge anyone who has information about anybody known or suspected to be a drug dealer who has as firearm licence, take that information in confidence to the Commissioner, and when I say in confidence, without any fear of reprisal, take it to the Commissioner, take the names of the individuals to the Commissioner and have a thorough investigation done.
Mr. Kerr-Jarrett: With regards to crime and violence I think we need to push forward. A couple of suggestions. I think we should move to have the police empowered to fingerprint suspects on arrest and not only upon conviction so they can build a database of criminals.
The other thing is that the fines and sentences need to be upgraded in the courts. Right now the fines are a joke, they are no longer relevant, they are going back to a time when the exchange rate was five to one and now it is fifty to one.
The other one is that JPs are under-utilised in this country. I am one and if I sit on the bench twice or three times a year it is a lot. I think we could do a lot more towards the whole crime and violence.
And with tourism, we have marketed tourism wrong, we have told the Jamaicans that they are not worth the effort to fix up the country for and they should stay over there and behave themselves and we are fixing up the nation for the to tourists.
We should fix up the nation for the Jamaicans and invite foreigners to come and visit our home, and in that way we have ownership and we will treat the land with respect, we will not litter it, destroy it and vandalise it and destroy it.
