PM Mitchell discards formal speech at CTO conference

by Curlan Campbell 

• Farmers, fishers and other supply chain members were not present to discuss industry’s future
• Prime Minister disregarded prepared speech to focus on need to have a more inclusive discussion with key industry partners
• Until recently, Grenada lacked plan to meet growing demand for water from tourism sector

During the official opening ceremony of the Caribbean Tourism Organisation’s (CTO) Sustainable Tourism Conference, Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell noted that farmers, fishers and other supply chain members were not present to discuss the industry’s future.

The Prime Minister, in his remarks at the Radisson Grenada Beach Resort in front of tourism representatives, government officials, industry experts, and hoteliers, decided to disregard his prepared speech, to instead focus on the need to have a more inclusive discussion with key industry partners who are often left out of high-level conversations regarding the fate of the industry. “Hoteliers will tell you it is difficult to get the type of food in quantities and quality that they need to sustain and remain competitive. But if the only solution is to import all the food, I guarantee you that tourism will not be sustainable,” he said. “We owe it to ourselves, to our farmers or fishermen or our agro-processors to ensure that we help them to become part of the solutions that we need to make our foods more sustainable…So if we are talking partnership, let us go beyond having a room where we are only speaking to ourselves but where we speak to the people who can assist us with the food partnership,” he said.

The Prime Minister’s remarks then shifted to the issue of sustainable water management in the tourism economy by highlighting the reality that, until recently, Grenada lacked a plan to meet the growing demand for water from the tourism sector. He referred to the recent commencement of the Climate Resilience of the Water Sector in Grenada (G-CREWS) project, co-financed by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) whose goal is to ensure that Grenada’s water sector is more climate-resilient and is managed more efficiently. “In many instances, we have, particularly in the dry season as we are experiencing now in Grenada, a significant shortage of water. But again, I think we can accept that Sandals per day will consume far more water than even the Ministerial Complex or schools, etc. We should not have to get to the point where we have to decide whether we supply Sandals with water or the schools with water,” he said.

Due to the challenging situation of water shortage — which is made even more difficult by increasing average temperatures — Prime Minister Mitchell called on tourism stakeholders at the conference to assist Government in finding solutions. “We owe it to ourselves to help our governments or policymakers identify the priority areas that will sustain tourism. By saying our capacity to provide the water that we need is going to be significantly challenged if we are not planning to match the growth in our hotels, the growth of hotel rooms by investing in water and it makes no sense saying its the government’s job, because if they don’t do it, or they do a poor job of it, it simply means your cost of doing business goes up a lot.”

Reverting briefly to his prepared speech, he emphasised the importance of marine conservation and coral restoration and expressed concern over the impact of climate change on the marine sector and its potential implications for tourism. He asked why hasn’t our local university taken the lead in coral restoration research in Grenada.

“Why are not our universities becoming the lead researchers in addressing coral restoration? If there are no corals to a large extent, there are no hotels. There are no beaches, there’s no scuba diving, etc. We depend on it. It’s part of the core infrastructure needed for the sustainability of tourism. Therefore, we need to help fund, we need to help advocate, we need to help encourage our universities to create more marine biologists and create marine biologists who want to research and find solutions to how we restore coral and how we treat our fish stock,” he said.