Editorial | Mr Seiveright’s chance

By appointing him minister of state, Prime Minister Andrew Holness has formalised the role Delano Seiveright has played for most of the nine years that he has been in the tourism ministry.

For while Mr Seiveright’s official title was senior strategist, he was effectively Edmund Bartlett’s deputy, acting both as the minister’s spokesman and go-to man when Mr Bartlett was not around. He was a capable backup voice for the minister.

However, given the specific responsibilities he has now been assigned, Mr Seiveright, if not distracted by the incipient election campaign, can lift himself from Mr Bartlett’s shadow, while making a significant contribution to the broader economy. Indeed, should Mr Seiveright fully grasp the mandate, he could begin to shape the contours of a critical element in any strategy for sustainable growth: an industrial policy.

In announcing Mr Seiveright’s promotion two days after his appointment to the Senate, Jamaica House, the prime minister’s office, said: “In his new role, Senator Seiveright will focus on increasing the linkages between the tourism sector and the wider economy, ensuring that more Jamaicans benefit directly from the industry’s growth.”

This was placed in the context of the prime minister’s declaration in November of his government’s “pivot” from macroeconomic stability to search for robust growth.

Mr Seiveright’s assignment also comes less than a month after Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders, including Prime Minister Holness, announced at their summit in Barbados a project for the community’s leisure industry to source more of its goods and services from the region. CARICOM will work with the Caribbean Private Sector Organisation (CPSO) on this initiative.

“ They (heads of government) agreed that the (CARICOM) Secretariat and the CPSO would undertake a granular study of the linkages between tourism, agriculture, manufacturing, entertainment and cultural sectors in the Region,” the meeting’s communiqué said.

“ The study should identify the 20 most important products used by the tourism sector from each of the other sectors with a view to facilitating more and better regional production of these products.”

GROSS EARNINGS

The online economic data site Statista estimated that the entire Caribbean region (including non-CARICOM states) earned US$91.2 billion from tourism in 2024, an increase of seven per cent over the previous year.

This newspaper’s disaggregation of earnings data for 2022, the most recent period for which country breakouts were readily available, suggests that CARICOM earned US$17 billion from the industry.

There is no readily available figure of what proportion of its gross earnings the Caribbean tourism collective retains in the region. However, industry spokesmen put the country-by-country estimate at between 15 per cent and 50 per cent.

In Jamaica, whose estimated gross in 2024 was US$4.38 billion (the projection for 2025 is US$5 billion), the Government places the retention at 40 per cent, which some analysts believe to be high.

At this rate, around US$1.75 billion (J$275 billion) was kept in the island last year for the purchase of goods and services and meeting other expenses, including wages.

Like tourism ministers before him, Mr Bartlett has stressed the good sense of Jamaica keeping more of what it earns from tourism in the domestic economy. But despite decades of talk, Jamaica has been unable to create the hoped-for broad and deep linkages between tourism and the rest of the economy.

That, in part, is because the island’s manufacturing sector, impacted by high energy costs and low productivity, has largely declined or stagnated. The majority of items of furniture and equipment consumed by the sector is imported. As is the bulk of the food, given Jamaica’s agriculture high input costs, low utilisation of technology, and the low productivity of its mostly small farms.

MARKET MATCHMAKERS

Apart from aggressively working with the appropriate local and regional ministries and agencies to advance the CARICOM initiative, Mr Seiveright has plenty of opportunity, and space, to enhance value-added in the tourism sector. At least, he can seriously begin the process.

He can proceed, simultaneously, on two tracks: the immediate and opportunistic, and the strategic.

The first of these is to scour the domestic marketplace for goods and services that can be competitively sourced, and which are not now consumed by the tourism sector.

In that sense, he and his team, aided by existing and new technology platforms, will be market matchmakers, bringing together buyers and sellers. Cutting the island’s US$1.2-billion food import bill (up to a quarter of which, according to experts, could be substituted with domestic production) should be one area of focus.

The larger and more difficult is the other bit – fashioning a holistic, coherent and sustainable strategy for the expansion of the economy, using tourism, given its size, as a launch pad.

This will include, at one level, shaping a consensus between public- and private-sector and worker organisations around an industrial policy, which means, in some cases, identifying critical areas of the economy for support and incentivising expansion. It will demand, too, working with institutions of education and training, and research and innovation,while promoting their link with the productive economy.

Seen from an expansive perspective, Mr Seiveright’s assignment transcends tourism. He has the energy and ambition for the job. The question is whether he sees the big picture.