The summer of 2012 brought renewed attention to a practice that had been degrading Jamaica’s beaches for decades: illegal and poorly regulated sand mining. A series of media investigations and community complaints focused on specific sites where sand was being extracted from beaches and riverbeds at rates that were visibly altering the coastline, and where the regulatory response had been inadequate to match the scale of the activity.
The closing months of 2002 brought the long-running problem of illegal sand mining to particular prominence. Reports from multiple parishes described continued extraction of beach sand for construction, with enforcement proving unable to keep pace with the economic incentive driving the activity.
