The projection by the World Tourism Organization that global tourist arrivals will reach a billion this year signals a dramatic and remarkably quick recovery for an industry that had been hard hit by the global economic crisis. It ought to bring a considerable measure of comfort to the Caribbean. But does it? Even as the WTO was bringing the industry the good news that, globally, international tourist arrivals had grown by 4.4 per cent last year, peaking at around 939 million and that arrivals in the Caribbean had grown by around 4 per cent, an influential voice in the region, the Caribbean Development Bank was cautioning tourism-dependent territories to begin an urgent search for other economic pursuits that could remove or at least reduce that dependency.
Last week, in a blunt expression of concern over the heavy dependence on visitor arrivals by some Caribbean territories, CDB economist Ian Durant said they needed to wake up to the reality of the need to restructure their economies to lessen the blow of