TOURISM Minister Edmund Bartlett has thrown out a challenge to the nation’s farmers, urging them to boost production to help satisfy growing demand for food in the booming hotel sector.

Jamaica’s tourism sector has been recovering strongly following its reopening from a COVID-19-induced shutdown for three months — March to May 2020 — and last year welcomed 4.1 million visitors spending US$4.3 billion. The success has continued into this year, with 1.1 million tourists arriving for vacation on the island over the first 10 weeks of 2024 spending more than US$1.25 billion, putting the sector on track to achieving the target of hosting five million visitors by 2025 and earning US$5 billion in revenues. Bartlett wants at least half of that earning to be retained in Jamaica by 2025, up from 30 per cent a decade ago.

“There is still a far way to go and let me tell you why,” Bartlett said in a recent Jamaica Observer Business Forum. “We have to scale up our production in the sectors that provide services for tourism, meaning we need to expand the production capacity in agriculture, we need to do so much more. In fact, it is just about 20 per cent of the demand that is met by our local agriculture sector,” he added.

The tourism minister argued that the sector can consume all the eggs produced in the country and most of the juices and drinks as well.

“Consumption in tourism is 24/7 and the propensity to consume of the tourist is three to five times of the local. So your market here for 2.9 million people is X, to supply now for the tourism means X times a factor. So what we are saying is that the scope for growth and expansion in this is almost infinite right now. Then on the manufacturing side, for furnishings for beds, for sheet for pillows, for blankets, tissue, paper products, soaps, candles, you name it, the sector needs it all,” he continued.

A demand study done in 2015 to inform the country about the needs of the tourism sector shows the annual leakage from the sector due to exports could be as high as $70 billion – $65 billion in manufactured goods and between $1.6 to $5 billion for agricultural produce including meats, fresh fruits and vegetables, herbs, legumes, teas, tubers, cereals and grains. It is not clear how much of that is being supplied by local manufacturers and farmers since the study was done almost a decade later, but Bartlett said he is confident that more of the demand from hotels is being satisfied locally, though he could not immediately say by how much.

“We have to do an analysis now, post-COVID. But I can say anecdotally, that it would have moved significantly simply because the supply side has moved at a level that has been unprecedented in our history since COVID. Far more farmers are inserted now in the whole process, manufacturers are doing more, and more local products are in the tourism sector. You go into a hotel and see the fruits and vegetables now that are there, they are all by and large ours.”

He pointed out that issues still exist between hotels and entertainers especially about what to pay the locals, and apart from calling the situation “a very complex arrangement”, the tourism minister added, “sometimes I don’t want to comment because believe me, it is such a delicate area of engagement, because once you play around with people’s creativity, you can’t price it. So I can’t say to you what your price should be for your creativity.”

But all of that demand is about to go up. Though the country is close to its 2025 target — five million visitors spending US$5 billion — it is adding new rooms at a rapid rate, even exceeding the target of having 15,000 new rooms by 2025, having added 20,000 over the last 10 years, and that for Bartlett, means more mouths to feed and more rooms to stock out with furnishings, towels, soaps and other items.

Already, Jamaica’s drought endangered agricultural sector face shortages. Companies have highlighted that this has impacted their production, and the matter has been exacerbated by agroprocessors competing with hotels for produce. For Bartlett, that situation cannot continue if the country’s overall growth is to be enhanced.

“New targets will now have to be set. We have asked the Inter-America Development Bank to help us fund a new study that is to give us the economic impact of 20,000 new rooms in Jamaica. That study, we have just sent out the request for proposal for that, and hopefully in the current fiscal year, we will commence that study. So that will give us a set of empirical data to guide in the future, how tourism in the future is going to be developed. It will also give us data on investments for investment bankers to be able to look at, but most importantly, all of it is a supply side analysis, because the power of wealth creation in tourism is on the supply side, and that’s the side that the ordinary people can own. The experiences that you have is the little guy who has the cookshop down the road. The little guy who makes his ganja treat and the little lady who uses her plants and herbs to create oils and wraps and ointments and so on. It is the guy who sets up his little hut in the corner of a place and make them special huts and in no time he is having a big tourism flow to these special little huts.”

“We get all caught up with hotel size and foreigners owning hotels. That’s not where the wealth of tourism is! The wealth of tourism is in the supplies. In other words, what do they eat, what do they drink, what do they wear, what kind of transportation they have. Where did they go, what kind of entertainment there is. That’s where the money is and that must be owned by us. And that’s why we set up the Tourism Linkages Network, and that’s why we put $1 billion at EXIM Bank to be onlend to small and medium-sized enterprises to enable them to get a good cost of money. That’s why we set up the Jamaica Centre for Tourism Innovation to train our small enterprises to manage their businesses better, to be able to market their business and to be able to innovate and come up with new ideas and new products,” Bartlett stated.

He identified at least three projects from young people that are coming on stream for which the Government has provided $100 million to develop their concepts into workable models ranging from marine conservation and development, to a luxurious form of camping called ‘glamping’ — a merging of the words glamour and camping and one in medical tourism.

He said those will help to retain more of the tourism spend in Jamaica and help small players to benefit as much as the large players such as GraceKennedy, Seprod, Wisynco and other companies that sell a large amount of products to the sector.

“The 10 to 11 per cent of GDP that they say tourism represents, masks the real impact….that tourism in fact is close to 40 per cent of the GDP because of its connections in the various other sectors of the economy. It drives construction. All the mega constructions that we are seeing are happening with the hotels or apartments for Airbnb and so on”

But will Jamaica ever be able to fully supply the sector with what it wants?

“I don’t think we can go beyond supplying 60 per cent of the demands from the sector because there are certain things that we are not producing nor have the capacity to produce. For example, we don’t provide rice, we don’t produce wheat for flour. Certain cuts too of the meat are difficult if not impossible. Wines, we do not produce wines in Jamaica and wine is a huge item of consumption. So, there are items that we will not be able to produce, but the one’s that we can produce like fresh fruits and vegetables, by all means we should produce them.”