Briefing
- NEPA budget cut further under IMF fiscal consolidation programme.
- Coastal fisheries management unit reduced to skeleton staffing levels.
- Fishing community organisations reported declining catches and rising poverty.
- Tourism earnings remained the primary justification for coastal protection investments.
- Environmental advocates warned austerity was accelerating long-term coastal degradation.
Jamaica’s public finances in 2011 were under significant pressure from the debt service obligations that had accumulated through the 2000s and from the reduced revenues of the post-2008 downturn. The fiscal consolidation programme that the government was implementing under IMF guidance required significant reductions in public expenditure across most categories of government spending. The regulatory and management agencies that were nominally responsible for Jamaica’s coastal environment — NEPA, the Fisheries Division, the National Land Agency, the Forestry Department — were not exempt from these reductions. Most of them had been chronically underfunded before the austerity programme. The cuts made a bad situation worse.
The Fisheries Division’s reduction to skeleton staffing was particularly significant. The Division was responsible for monitoring fishing activity, enforcing the fish pot moratorium and other conservation measures, maintaining the register of fisherfolk and fishing vessels, and administering the programmes through which the government provided support to fishing communities. With fewer staff, the monitoring functions were effectively suspended, the enforcement functions were reduced to occasional and inconsistent operations, and the administrative functions were delayed. The fishing communities that depended on those administrative functions — for recognition, for support programmes, for the resolution of disputes with development interests that were encroaching on traditional fishing grounds — lost access to a government presence that had already been inadequate.
The Poverty-Environment Link
The reports from fishing community organisations in the final quarter of 2011 described conditions that were a convergence of multiple pressures: declining fish catches from degraded reef and coastal ecosystems; reduced income from reduced catch; rising fuel prices that increased the cost of fishing operations while revenues stagnated; and reduced access to the credit and support programmes that the underfunded Fisheries Division had previously administered. The fishers who were bearing these combined pressures were the same fishers who had the least capacity to absorb them: communities that had historically operated at the margin of the formal economy, without the savings, insurance, or livelihood alternatives that would have cushioned the impact of adverse conditions.
Tourism’s Protection
The one area of coastal management that received relatively protected funding even under austerity was the work that could be directly linked to tourism infrastructure protection. The argument that beach maintenance at resort areas was necessary to protect foreign exchange earnings was one that the treasury could understand and that the tourism ministry prosecuted successfully. The result was a coastal management budget allocation that further skewed toward the resort corridor and away from the communities and ecosystems that were not part of the commercial tourism product. Austerity did not reduce coastal management funding uniformly; it reduced it selectively, in ways that concentrated the remaining resources on the coastal assets that the dominant economic logic valued most.
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