What's Happening?
The laws and lack of laws in Jamaica have infringed upon the human rights of Jamaicans to access and use the sea around the island.
In recent years there has been an acceleration to restrict and block the public right to have unfettered access to the Caribbean sea in Jamaica. This is a carefully designed plan by the government with the private hotels/hoteliers (local and international) and wealthy beachfront property owners. The plan is very advanced in carving up Jamaican beach birthright and is akin to the Berlin conference of 1885 that divided Africa.
This plan includes no room for environmental and economic justice or diversification of a sustainable island economy of the future. Jamaica, an island, is rapidly becoming a landlocked people that will be barricaded away from our own beautiful shores. We will be unable to exercise the ancient right to enjoy our precious beaches. This is tantamount to blatant discrimination of the Jamaican people that has gone unchecked by successive governments.
Our fragile coast is now a more exclusive economic zone designed for marketability at the expense of the Jamaican people whose rights and liberty has been ignored. These practices are discriminatory and environmentally destructive. The destruction of our sandy shores disregards nature as a living entity and its sensitive ecosystem. This plan has been done with no consideration for the heritage of the Jamaican society and ordinary Jamaicans have no say in this master plan that will impact us for generations to come. This is colonialism all over again.
The JaBBEM movement aims to restore Beach Rights and Justice for the unfettered access to all Jamaican beaches by everyone, and to advocate for environmental beach personhood for Jamaica’s beaches. We also aim to advocate for environmental and economic justice for nature and our people who have been marginalized yet again by special interests with the complicity of our government. Does this remind you of one of the greatest atrocities in our history? It is ironic that the same shores that our ancestor’s black bodies were dehumanized, it is these same shores that have now become economic spaces from which we are excluded. You cannot use land ownership to exclude people from their beach birthright.
Will we stand for this?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!