To me is it no accident that the region now has a tourism based economy. The Bahamas led the way in this.
At one time, the region was largely agriculture and mining.
Today services including tourism and financial services lead the way. The Bahamas made an essential contribution to this development.
Perhaps of greatest importance is the risk Bahamians took in demonstrating that national development could be funded by tourism. It is a lead that many others in our region have been encouraged to follow.
This is especially so since the challenges made to small Caribbean economies by the change in European Community trade protocols. These migrations, inputs and exchanges provided the building blocks for the modern Bahamas and, no doubt, many of our sister nations.
Once considered as a luxury item, “the vacation” has become now such a necessity that tourism is indisputably the greatest vehicle of global exchange today.
The vacation surpasses even agriculture in the global economy.
In the global exchange, we provide millions of Americans, Canadians and Europeans each year with an escape from the cold, from everyday pressures and the routine of work.
Tourism is therefore critically important to the life of the region and to the livelihood of our people.
Long ago, we laid to rest the myth that tourism was too fickle, too unreliable, too fragile an industry to serve as a viable primary engine for national development..
How ironic now to find that it is to tourism that we must turn to escalate the process of development even in the least developed areas of our region.
The World Tourism Organisation’s Secretary-General, recently said:
“Tourism has proved to be an effective way to address several of the Millennium Goals, especially goal N
