Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett has emphasised that Jamaica is restructuring the tourism industry to ensure that more of the earnings from the sector go to the small and medium tourism enterprises.
The Minister made the comment yesterday during a Ministerial Debate on Policies to Foster Tourism for Rural Development during the 24th session of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) General Assembly in Madrid, Spain.
“There are inequities we know to exist in those who are the real providers of tourism experiences and those who are the beneficiaries of the tourism spend. Globally, 80 per cent of tourism is driven by the small and medium players, but only 20 per cent of the returns go to them. We have to rebalance that asymmetry, and I think that the policy that Jamaica has adopted in this regard will go a long way in enabling this rebalancing,” said Bartlett.
He added that research has shown that people travel to experience culture not traditionally found in the resort areas but in rural communities. Therefore the Ministry will be focusing heavily on leveraging community tourism experiences, especially those focusing on the country’s rich biodiversity.
“We have developed a programme to drive community tourism through the very rich biodiversity which Jamaica has. We have more than 30,000 species of plants which generate for us enormous nutraceutical values. It is the rural folk that provides for us the herbs and spices and the paramedical applications that are so useful for health and wellness,” he said.
Bartlett added that this would be done using three main methods. These methods include capacity development of the people to organize and set up structures that will allow them to benefit from corporative activities; secondly to broaden their scope and perspective to develop more indigenous products; and thirdly to set up financial arrangements to give smaller players access to finance.
“We have put J$1 billion into our EXIM Bank that is on-lend to small and medium tourism enterprises. That funding is provided to them at some 4% interest over five years with a maximum amount of J$25 million,” he said.
“Another key aspect is marketing, and we have provided the marketing arrangements in what we call Village Tourism. Within this village structure, we are establishing artisan villages and the purpose of that is to allow the artisans to operate in situ,” he added.
