Hope For Haiti:
Jamaica Helps With Tourism Plan

KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC - Elements of Jamaica’s tourism master plan are being used to as part of a strategy for the socio-economic development of earthquake devastated Haiti, Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett has said.

He said the strategy called the Montego Bay Initiative will position tourism as a main pillar for the economic development of Haiti that was devastated by a January 12 earthquake killing an estimated 230,000 people and leaving more than a million others homeless.

"The model which is being used, is really a model that draws heavily on the Jamaica Tourism Master Plan and, therefore, it makes it very easy for us to respond and to work well with it," Bartlett said.

He said that the idea of a Caribbean tourism fraternity on Haiti had been raised during a Tourism Outlook Seminar held in Montego Bay earlier this month and attended by the United Nations World Trade Organization (UNWTO) Regional Director, Carlos Vogeler.

Bartlett said the meeting discussed steps that could be taken to work with Haiti in enabling a restoration, and an economic recovery program that would see tourism as a critical component.

Bartlett said that Haiti has already identified tourism as one of the three pillars on which its economic restoration program would be predicated.

The others are agriculture and light manufacturing industries. He said that the Haitian Tourism Authority has already created a master plan for the development of their industry, and the conclusion was that it should be adopted as the template to present to the UNWTO on March10, in Berlin.

He said that the plan would be further developed and used by the UNWTO to create the awareness of the global community to the Haitian reality, and would also inform the mobilization efforts of the UNWTO to get the resources required to re-build the Haitian economy on the basis of tourism as a centre piece of its activities.

"The program will see a fusion of efforts between ourselves and, of course, the wider CARICOM initiative and ...all of what is going to be done will be dovetailed, carefully, into the overall CARICOM initiative.”

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