~ Complacency about crime, service, environment destroying tourism ~
DAWN BEACH--Complacency in the Caribbean on service and the environment, coupled with ministers who are apologetic about law enforcement and crime, have set the Caribbean tourism industry on the same path as the failed sugar industry.
International finance and public-policy expert Professor Avinash Persaud delivered probably the hardest-hitting message to the CTO's State of the Industry Conference over the weekend, suggesting that the Caribbean region is "lucky to have a tourism industry at all" and stressing that the product is not sustainable in its current state.
"How can it be sustainable to have a region dependant on tourism that is a region with the highest crime rates in the world? How can it be sustainable to invite people to enjoy our pristine environments and to have smelly landfills for our trash or pump it out over the very beaches we ask people to spend thousands of dollars to sit on?" Persaud asked.
"How is that sustainable to charge people hundreds of dollars a night [in hotel stay, ed.] and deliver the kind of service that we all know in this room that you get in the Caribbean on average, compared to what they get in places now more increasingly accessible to the tourists that we target?" Persaud told a room filled with approximately 200 conference delegates.
In a presentation entitled "The Caribbean's Reality Check," Persaud focused on the risks facing the Caribbean tourism sector, how the region compares with the competition and where the responsibilities lie. Persaud is well known for developing a number of concepts, including investors' shifting appetite for risk, liquidity black holes and the role of diversity in liquidity and systemic risk control.
He expressed his fears that the tourism industry is headed the way as the once-profitable sugar industry, burdened by the some of the same core problems. "The sugar industry failed because of a lack of investment by our private sector. They didn't invest because they didn't need to invest because they had the preferences. They could be least efficient every year, and as a result of collapsing profit margins they couldn't invest," he said.
"We ended up with one of the most inefficient sugar industries in the world, having had one of the most productive sugar industries in world. I fear that our complacency [in the tourism industry, ed.] is going to take us in the same direction. We are complacent on crime, complacent on service quality, complacent on our environment."
The professor pushed a message of zero tolerance for crime, the potential death knell for the Caribbean, and argued that politicians and law enforcement had become apologists.
"Whenever you hear a government minister apologising for crime with 'oh, don't worry, it's drugs' or 'don't worry, it's gangs, and you're not going to be affected,' you must realise that criminals do not have a highly developed sense of moral duty when they are running behind that gang member. They don't pause and say, 'There is an innocent bystander in the way,'" Persaud said.
At the end of the day, he continued, "We can only be independent if we are economically strong and we cannot be strong if we are crime-ridden. We must have zero tolerance towards crime."
In addition, the professor said there was a critical need to raise service quality to international standards and implement a benchmark of expectations. He added, "We sit in the middle of two of the largest markets, being North and South America, which is larger than Asia. What fails us is complacency and hunger. The region needs to come together and replace fear with desire to exploit opportunities and employee capital."
On the environment, Persaud said the first thing Caribbean nations must do was account for their environment. "We as a region mine our environment, we generate revenues from our nature, and we sell it. This is fine if you know what you're doing, if you're accounting for the environmental degradation and investing back into that environment.
"So we must begin by having a balance sheet. Every country should establish an environmental balance sheet with our environmental assets and liabilities. We should know that we are growing not because we are reducing our assets, but we're getting returns from investment in our environment. We have to rethink the way we exploit the environment," he said.
Persaud also said the Caribbean was a mirror image of the world today, with assets but no money, which was not attractive for investors. "We need to do a better job to engage, exploit and employ available capital in the region," he argued.
According to him, records show that there is US $10 billion sitting in the region's banks, while another several billions in pension schemes are there untouched, while there is need for that capital to push the industry forward.
"But it is too easy to lay the responsibility at the door of Government. It is our owners who lack commercial hunger, ill-invest and wait for someone to buy them out. If running a hotel is less profitable than selling a condominium, that says more about the quality of our management and labour than it does about our airlift and taxes," he said.
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