OUR tourism administrators, and people who make their living from the sector, must be feeling as if they are on a treadmill.

For once again this issue of tourist harassment is, we are told, causing a problem.

Tourism Minister Dr Wykeham McNeill is reported as telling delegates attending the sixth Biennial Diaspora Conference in Montego Bay yesterday that cruise visitors are shying away from getting off their ships when they get here because they are being harassed.

The upshot, Dr McNeill pointed out, is that the problem is preventing small business operators from earning from tourism.

The problem, as we pointed out, is not new. For decades Jamaica’s tourism administrators and people in the trade have had to confront this issue.

It is something they have had to deal with delicately because, as Dr McNeill pointed out, curtailing harassment is often seen as being “against the little man”.

Unfortunately, that kind of thinking has been encouraged by people who know better, but who have done so for political, social, and personal reasons.

It stems from the entitlement mentality that took root in this country in the 1970s and which has done a great disservice to Jamaica.

For, as Minister McNeill correctly pointed out, the people who operate small businesses will benefit from tourism if visitors are allowed to walk the streets of our resort cities and towns without being bothered.

Dr McNeill is reported as saying that an anti-harassment campaign that was started some time ago by the Tourism Product Development Company in association with the Jamaica Constabulary Force, the Port Authority of Jamaica, and other stakeholders, will be intensified.

That is all well and good, as the message of the damage that visitor harassment does to the sector, and to Jamaica at large, will always get through to some people.

However, there is little chance of a mind change among the hard core harassers — those who peddle drugs and other illegal substances.

The answer to that, we believe, lies in greater police presence on the streets of our resort centres, especially on the days when cruise vessels arrive.

At the same time, our two political parties, who hold much sway among the populace, should consider it their duty to repeatedly remind their base of the damage that tourist harassment does to Jamaica.

In addition, people living and working in resort communities should not allow their livelihood to be threatened.

Tourism is too vital an industry to Jamaica’s survival for us to have it jeopardised by a few miscreants.