Recientemente ha sido producido y editado un documental de 92 minutos que explica el impacto de la industria turística en la la isla caribeña de Jamaica. La película, dirigida por Esther Figueroa y producida por esta misma autora y Diana McCaulay, explica los impactos sociales, económicos y medioambientales que el modelo turístico jamaicano (controlado por capital extranjero) ha causado en el país. Entre otras joyas, el documental muestra el trato que reciben los constructores de un hotel de una cadena española por parte de los gerentes de esta multinacional. Un documental de visión obligatoria.
Más información sobre el documental, en su página web: http://www.jamaicaforsale.net/
A continuación reproducimos algunas críticas publicadas sobre la película.
John Maxwell. The Jamaica Observer. 16/11/2008
That sale was as nothing compared to the present 'madness' sale, initiated by P J Patterson and enthusiastically endorsed by Bruce Golding. If Seaga was selling the furniture, Patterson and Golding have been scrapping the house itself, selling the verandah, the doors and windows and the flooring.
The Jamaica Environment Trust and Vagabond Media, two entirely Jamaican organisations, have teamed up to produce a cool, calm documentary examination of the methodical, brutal and unsustainable development of the tourism industry of Jamaica.
What they say is not new: most Jamaicans already have a pretty good idea of what is happening. The wanton destruction of the Jamaican landscape, an integral component of the Jamaican "tourism product", has made the pages of the New York Times, the National Geographic, countless Internet blogs and lots of other places. What is new is that the whole horror story is presented about Jamaicans, by Jamaicans, for Jamaicans.
Jamaica for sale allows the Jamaican victims of our fantasy development to speak: the craft vendors, the construction workers, the hotel workers, the fishermen, hotel owners and managers and the ordinary citizens who see themselves under siege by unscrupulous people with much more money than sense and with no recognisable aesthetic or environmental values and no feeling for the Jamaican people or the Jamaican reality.
One of the construction workers says near the beginning of the video:
"Dem is like ticks 'pon we back" - an eloquent expression of the reality of the new tourism - parasitic and dangerous to health. The workers tell of dreadful working conditions, 12-hour days for $800 - below the already inadequate Jamaican minimum wage - and their employers are not poor companies. Their rules and laws are enforced by the Jamaican constabulary whose interest is not justice but "Law and Order".
The people attracted to the worksites and to the tourism development areas find nowhere to live and many become squatters. Even the squatters in the wetlands are turfed off; bulldozers come by night and demolish their miserable dwellings, destroying their furniture, their few personal possessions and wrecking their lives. Their rivers, streams and beaches are polluted by wastes of all kinds. I have taken photographs of human excrement in the sea at the formerly pristine Pear Tree Bottom Beach. What remains of the gazetted public beach and public fishing beach is now off limits to the public, by the illegal order of the National Works Agency which has erected a sign warning that 'Trespassers will be Prosecuted'.
In Negril there is a new development afoot that will reconstruct the coastline, building artificial inlets and beaches a la Dubai - to maximise their profit at the expense of the Jamaican environment which, in this area, is largely unexploited and unspoiled.
One Negril hotelier, a Jamaican, with tears in his voice, describes the plight of workers whose children have no schools and who have to take two or three buses to get to work, spending up to a third of their meagre wages on transportation. There is, he laments, no social development to match the commercial development.
All this despite the alleged fact that tourism is Jamaica's leading earner of foreign exchange.
But where does this foreign exchange go? The craft vendors complain that hotel guests are warned off the Jamaica outside the hotels: they will be robbed and murdered -they are told. So the few who venture outside are mobbed by vendors and others wanting a piece of the action, terrifying hotel guests who have been comprehensively warned of the badness of the people they will meet outside.
The video was shot before the tourist Mecca of Ocho Rios was overwhelmed by mudslides and human excrement from the unplanned squatter settlements above the town. No one seems to have learned anything from this disaster. There are no plans to build a new town for the thousands of people who need accommodation, many of whom work in the hotels but who live in subhuman conditions or have to travel miles to work every day.
The current worldwide economic disaster will eventually catch up with the lunacies of fantasy development. The price of oil will increase rapidly as it becomes more scarce and will put airlines and cruise ships out of business. But, sadly, not before we transform beautiful Jamaican towns like Falmouth into tourist-only communities, 'attractions' a la Colonial Williamsburg and Disneyland. These guys are not only stealing beaches, they are stealing whole towns.
In the meantime the burgeoning people-processing industry is busy destroying the foundation on which its real attraction is built. The bozos who are building the monstrous concrete ramparts by the sea were attracted to Jamaica because it is Jamaica, but they are determined, like other uncivilised people, to distort and deform what is natural but foreign to them to suit their tiny-minded fantasies of 'Treasure Island' and similar mythical European versions of paradise. They will mistreat wild animals like dolphins and killer whales until they become extinct, like the tigers which now mainly and for the time being may only be found in zoos.
Eating biodiversity
On the hotel coast there is another serious threat to the Jamaican environment. Imported foreign workers have discovered that we have snakes and turtles and they are eating them to extinction. The hotels are closing down turtle-nesting sites, and hotel excrement and waste are killing our reefs at an increasing pace. In the video, fishermen from all along the north and west coasts are complaining that the reefs are dying, fouled by over-fertilisation from the hotels or other land-based sources of pollution.
The beaches themselves are going, either stolen by the truckload by night or destroyed by interference with the sea-floor or the wetlands that nourish the beaches. In the video one man testified to what I know from personal experience. Even a few years ago, the beaches in Negril, alone in all Jamaica, extended up to a hundred metres into the sea.
Today, the sea-floor at Negril is no longer sandy but mainly mud. As we told the Urban Development Corporation more than 30 years ago, most of Negril's sand was made by argillaceous algae, "seaweed" that absorbed calcium from the water and crystallised it as flakes of 'sand' which gave Negril's beaches their unique powdery feel. If these flakes of calcium carbonate are not constantly refreshed by the algae, the beaches will die - as they have died.
Part of this problem arose from the UDC's determination to use the Negril Morass as a sink for hotel sewage, poisoning the South Negril River which nourished the argillaceous algae.
Another problem with Negril is that the UDC - unlike King Canute - refused to believe that they could not control the tides. We at the Natural Resources Conservation Authority told them 30 years ago that they should not build a groyne at the point on which Hedonism Two (then Negril Beach Village) was sited. At that time, NRCA had an oceanographer on staff, a Jamaican who became so fed up with the bureaucracy's unwillingness to listen to reason that he gave up and went off to study law instead. The illegal UDC groyne interrupted the flow of sand from the north of the seven-mile strip, thus interfering with the supply of regular sand that provided the foundation for the powdery flakes from the south. Between these two deficits, Negril's famous beaches are now reduced to thin, mostly muddy strips, attracting hosts of sandflies (which, paradoxically, prefer mud to sand).
Now, on the North coast, those who do not steal sand from other beaches dredge it from beyond the reefs that guard the coast.
Since the living corals preserve the integrity of the inshore beaches, subtracting sand from the seaward side of dead reefs will eventually undermine them and destroy them. At that time, the beaches built by theft or by illegal dredging will disappear and 'Jamaica - No Problem" will become 'Jamaica - Big Problem'.
Unknown to the foreign hoteliers, Jamaica was always more than a beach. In a few years they will discover what life is like without beaches. The vulgar people-processing plants on the cutting edge of unsustainable development will be besieged by rising seas in their lobbies and storm surges on their third and fourth floors.
Then perhaps, we can build a sound tourism industry on the rubble of our fantasy hotels, new reefs, man-made and offering accommodation to starfish and swarms of jellyfish.
The video Jamaica for Sale, is much more polite than this column, and its producers are not responsible for my comments. But I urge you to see the video when it is next shown on television sometime in December. Before that there will be a special fundraising showing at the Red Bones Café on November 29th. You should look out for notices in the press.
Walk good and take care where you swim.
Kerina King. The Gleaner. 8/2/2009
Jamaica For Sale is a labour of love from film-makers Diana McCaulay and Esther Figueroa - love for our beaches, our mangroves, our reefs, our land, our water, but most of all, for our people. Ostensibly a manifesto against the unchecked growth of large-scale tourism on the north coast, the film is also a portrait of its inhabitants - the small hoteliers, vendors, fishermen and squatters who comprise its social fabric. It doesn't quite work; the environmental message is diluted by the extended interviews, and the social tableaux suffer from the environmental moralising.
But there is much to praise about Jamaica For Sale. It is, first and foremost, an indigenous product - made by Jamaicans, mostly with Jamaicans, for Jamaicans. In a marketplace long since saturated with disposable American media, this alone is worthy of celebration.
Unyielding resilience
Second, as is so often the case with Third-World cinema, Jamaica For Sale gives voice to the under-represented and unseen. We meet Paletta Watt, a Montego Bay vendor selling local craft to foreigners; Hugh Moncrieffe, owner of Time 'n' Place in Trelawny, visibly disturbed by the destruction of the seaside ecosystem; Veronica Tracy, resident of Pear Tree Bottom, St Ann, forcibly relocated from her informal settlement, losing her home and her crops. Her face tells its own rich story, pain and struggle wrapped in unyielding resilience.
Third, the film reaches for a historical perspective, all too welcome in a society addled by Internet-ready attention spans and the concept of inevitable progress. Footage of our Independence ceremony, the transfer of power from the British, is mesmerising both for its truth and its lies. The awesome responsibility of governing ourselves, a responsibility Figueroa and McCaulay seem to say we have shirked is countered by the sad realisation that we only transferred our dependence from one major economy (the United Kingdom) to another (the United States).
One of the film's subtlest (perhaps even unintentional) but most powerful reminders is that a former minister of tourism, the Most Honourable P. J. Patterson, became prime minister for a decade and a half.
Neocolonialist position
Bonus points to Figueroa and McCaulay for their choice of Caribbean and female academics as interview subjects despite an over-reliance on the American academy. In a film about over-reliance on one American export (its wealthy middle class), the filmmakers' dependence on another (its university graduates) undercuts their message while underscoring our neocolonialist position.
Formal basics were spotty: voices were sometimes disembodied and unidentified; close-ups at times felt invasive; sound and video quality inconsistent. These flaws have more to do with inexperience and inattentiveness than an inadequate budget, and as such, are inexcusable.
In its best moments, however, Jamaica For Sale gains an almost operatic quality; contralto plus construction (or, depending on your perspective, destruction) is powerful. The film's best sequence may be its first. As the national anthem begins, performed by the Jamaica Defence Force Military Band, its brass notes are repurposed not over images of smiling schoolchildren or powerful athletes, but the irreversible alteration of our coastline. Concrete walls, chained gates, limestone dust clouds from tractors, and through the dust, a familiar sight: our flag, still fluttering in the sea breeze.
Dawn Marie Roper . Environment News Service. 28/10/2009
The Jamaica Environmental Trust on Thursday night launched "Jamaica for Sale," a 92 minute video documentary highlighting disturbing issues behind the island's normally rosy sun, sea and sand tourism image.
"We want to raise hard questions about the tourism industry, especially in light of the recent rise in a certain kind of tourism. There are costs. We are asking questions about these costs," said Diana McCaulay, chief executive officer of Jamaica Environmental Trust.
The video features the faces and voices of Jamaicans and other Caribbean personalities talking about life in the wake of a burst of construction of mega-hotels across Jamaica's coastline. The film shows how gains from tourism development come at a high price to the people.
"Government is selling of beaches and sometimes entire islands. This cuts off local citizens from having a say in what happens around them," said Mimi Sheller, a sociologist from Swarthmore College in the United States.
The film features small hoteliers and other citizens talking about the wide scale removal of the mangroves, wetlands and the breeding grounds of indigenous birds and turtles.
Early in the film, construction workers detail the ill-treatment and low wages they receive from the Spanish hotel developers.
One settler testified about the suffering she endures after her eviction from the home she and her family inhabited for generations. All of these things were done to make way for hotel development.
Craft vendors and small business operators describe the loss of business and lack of support from all-inclusive resort operators. Some complain that visitors are warned that they would be robbed if they venture into the towns.
Fishermen gave startling and even unintentionally humorous testimonies about the disappearance of the fish caused by mega-hotel developments on the coast, and about fisher folks' futile attempts to find new fishing grounds.
"The hotel dem a follow we everywhere we go," says Troy Jumpp, fisherman from the Whitehouse Fisherfolk Co-operative. There was irony too as even the hoteliers in coastal properties complain about the lack of fish and other species in the seas their visitors come to enjoy.
Comments from three former Jamaican prime ministers on their tourism development policies are interspersed throughout the film.
Political representatives, social scientists and economists weighed in on the issue, speaking about the "slavery" conditions of the workers, the lack of economic benefit to the poorer people and great developments fronting squalor.
"Jamaica for Sale" shows how places of historical significance are disappearing to make way for cruise ship facilities. This will happen to Falmouth, a town in northern Jamaica that is the site of centuries old forts, churches and markets once so prosperous that it had running water before New York City.
"Jamaica for Sale" shows security guards chasing locals from beaches which were once free to them - while the soundtrack features a popular Calypsonian singing, "This beach is mine."
But it is not just the beaches. In one village, the waste management plant from a prominent hotel causes a perpetual stink in the community, and the residents lament that apparently nothing is in the works to stop it.
Regarding the damage from tourists themselves, "Jamaica For Sale" points out that the average tourist drinks 10 times more water and produces three times more waste than locals. Tourism also demands high usage of energy derived from fossil fuels, which has implications for climate change.
"Jamaica for Sale" shows how local people are being cut off, penned in and denied their voice - all in the name of tourism development. The video places a major emphasis on the real price of tourism development.
"Jamaica for Sale" was produced with a budget of US$30,000 contributed by donors such the United States Embassy and individuals Louis Slesin, Bryan Langford, Maxine Burkett, Josh Stanboro, William Whitman and Meleanna Meyer.
Film-maker Esther Figueroa of Vagabond Media co-produced "Jamaica for Sale" for free.
McCaulay hopes to make the video widely available to schools and other audiences both locally and internationally. At the video launch event Thursday, she appealed for more financial support to make that happen.
Febrero de 2009