The Caribbean holds 46 percent of the international cruise market. Like Hawai`i, it is experiencing an economic slump. Agriculture, once the Caribbean’s economic mainstay, has not been a force in decades for most islands. The largest economic engine in the region is tourism, with cruise ships making up a major component of the industry.
With cruise ship traffic increasing at a rate of nearly 8 percent a year over the last two decades, the Caribbean wants desperately to maintain and expand cruise ship visits.
But is that advisable? Some analysts suggest that the cruise industry represents a net drain on island economies. For example, in the March 29 issue of Fortune Magazine, Jeff Wise reports that the islands may have already attracted more tourists than their infrastructure can handle. Caribbean governments may have over-estimated the carrying capacity not only of their roads and facilities, but also of the environment that people are paying to see, Wise writes.
He goes on to question whether the Caribbean islands may be paying out more than they are getting back from the cruise industry once roads, parking, transportation, utilities, safety and tax revenues (or lack of them) are factored in. Most cruise passengers eat, gamble and shop duty-free on board.
The main hope of islands, according to Wise, is that visitors will become so enamored of one of the ports of call that they will want to return on a later vacation. To attract those return visitors, islands are spending more money on port facilities and berths to accommodate the new generation of larger ships.
Whether this will pay off is debatable. Wise quotes Allan Chastanct, former tourist board director for St. Lucia, as saying, “Sixty-five percent of the cruise industry’s profit comes from the Caribbean, but only 7 percent of their employees come from the Caribbean, and only 1 percent of the taxes they pay come to the region.”
Seeing Clearly
One of the greatest attractions of the Caribbean is its crystalline waters. But keeping them clear in a time of growing cruise ship traffic is difficult, especially as cruise ships get larger and carry more passengers and crew. Waste control becomes not only an environmental issue, but also one of space.
The Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association estimates that the average cruise ship (2,000 passengers and crew) generates five tons of garbage a day. Storing that during long ocean crossings or while stopping at ports that cannot handle so much waste is an expensive engineering feat. Sometimes corners are cut.
According to a January 3, 1999, New York Times article by Douglas Frantz, maritime authorities are finding it increasingly difficult to police the cruise industry as it launches ever larger ships and as it tries to make itself exempt from American regulations. All major cruise ship owners sail under foreign flags, allowing them to avoid American corporate taxes and union wages. The country whose flag of convenience is most often flown — Liberia — has had its attention elsewhere for the last decade with ethnic warfare and an unorganized government and has not pursued with vigor notices of violations by carriers bearing its flag.
For instance, in 1994, the U.S. Justice Department and Coast Guard provided Liberia with mountains of evidence against the Royal Caribbean cruise line, but Liberia took no action against the line. Eventually, the U.S. took action on its own, and on March 23 of this year, Royal Caribbean pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to giving the Coast Guard false information three times in 1994 to conceal illegal discharges of oily waste water along the Pacific Coast.
In June of last year, the same company pleaded guilty in a Miami federal court for a fleetwide conspiracy to dump oily waste off Florida and Puerto Rico between 1990 and 1994. They admitted to rigging their ships’ pipes to bypass a costly system that separates oil sludge from wastewater, thus diverting all the waste went overboard without treatment.
Every time the separator is used, it must be logged. The Coast Guard and Justice Department also charged Royal Caribbean with giving them false logs. The cruise company was fined a record $9 million on June 3, 1998.
But less than a month later, on July 15, 1998, a junior engineer on the Nordic Empress, another Royal Caribbean ship, reported the ship was discharging oily waste and creating false records. The chief engineer was dismissed and sent home to Greece within a week, the New York Times reported.
(In 1998, Royal Caribbean Cruises made 45 port calls in Hawai`i with two ships, Rhapsody of the Seas and Legend of the Seas. Neither of these vessels was mentioned in connection with the cruise line’s problems in the Caribbean.)
— Heidi Kai Guth
Volume 9, Number 11 May 1999
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