17/08/2026
COMAND STRONGLY ENDORSES MINISTER BARTLETT’S BARRETT TOWN VISION
If this is the new philosophy of Jamaican tourism, then Minister Edmund Bartlett deserves our unequivocal support.
COMAND strongly endorses Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett’s vision for the integrated development of Barrett Town. It is one of the clearest acknowledgements yet that tourism cannot continue to prosper as an enclave economy, separated from the workers and communities that make the industry possible.
This is the kind of tourism development Jamaica has needed for decades.
The importance of the proposal goes far beyond another major hotel development. The vision connects tourism investment with worker housing, health care, education and training, agriculture, cottage industries, recreation and community infrastructure. It recognises that the community surrounding the hotel must become a participant in development rather than a spectator to it.
For that, Minister Bartlett deserves commendation.
IBEROSTAR ON ONE SIDE, LILLIPUT ON THE OTHER
The principle is particularly significant to those of us who have watched the transformation of the Rose Hall tourism corridor.
When Iberostar was being constructed, I wondered how this enormous international tourism investment and Lilliput, directly across the road, could continue to exist as two fundamentally different social and economic worlds.
One represented the extraordinary wealth and sophistication of Jamaica’s tourism industry.
Across the road was a large community containing many of the very workers whose labour supports that industry.
Geographically, they were neighbours.
Economically, the twain had hardly met.
Barrett Town therefore represents an opportunity to correct an old weakness in Jamaica’s tourism model. Tourism must become more deeply connected to the communities within which it operates.
COOPER’S PEN DOES NOT REQUIRE ANOTHER BARRETT TOWN
COMAND is not suggesting that Government replicate the scale of the Barrett Town intervention at Cooper’s Pen.
That is neither necessary nor practical.
The circumstances are fundamentally different.
At Cooper’s Pen, residents have already demonstrated something extremely important: self-reliance.
Families have invested their own resources and constructed their own shelter solutions. They did not wait on the State to provide conventional mortgage-financed houses. They mobilised savings, labour and family resources and progressively built homes according to their means.
Many have also demonstrated a willingness to contribute substantially towards the cost of the infrastructure necessary to formalise their community.
That changes the development equation.
Government does not have to build Cooper’s Pen from the ground up.
The people have already done much of the heavy lifting.
THE STATE MUST NOW COMPLETE THE PART INDIVIDUAL FAMILIES CANNOT
What Cooper’s Pen requires is a limited but strategic government intervention capable of converting an existing settlement into a properly planned, secure and sustainable community.
Government should facilitate resolution of the land and tenure question, undertake the necessary planning and surveying, establish appropriate development standards and provide or facilitate the trunk infrastructure that individual households cannot reasonably provide for themselves.
Residents can contribute towards roads, drainage, water, sewage or sanitation, electricity and other infrastructure through an affordable cost-recovery mechanism.
This is not a demand for free housing.
The housing largely exists.
It is a proposal to take the considerable private investment already made by ordinary Jamaicans and combine it with targeted public intervention to produce a sustainable community.
That distinction is critical.
NINE ACRES SHOULD NOT DEFEAT THE STATE
The scale of Cooper’s Pen makes the opportunity even more compelling.
We are not discussing an intervention comparable to the transformation contemplated for Barrett Town. If approximately nine acres can provide the basis for resolving the immediate Cooper’s Pen problem, this should be well within the institutional and financial capacity of the Jamaican State.
The Government should therefore determine what portion of the land can be appropriately developed, what infrastructure is required, what densities are sustainable, what environmental and planning standards must be satisfied, and what contribution residents can reasonably make toward those costs.
Where adjustments or limited relocation within the development are necessary to create roads, drainage, public spaces or infrastructure corridors, these should be negotiated with residents as part of the formalisation process.
The objective should be simple:
Preserve what can reasonably be preserved. Regularise what can be regularised. Improve what must be improved. Relocate only where absolutely necessary.
TURN SELF-HELP INTO NATIONAL POLICY
There is also a larger lesson here.
Jamaica’s affordable-housing debate remains too heavily centred on the conventional mortgage.
Thousands of working Jamaicans may never qualify for a traditional mortgage large enough to purchase a completed house in today’s market. Yet those same Jamaicans demonstrate repeatedly that, given access to secure land, they can build progressively from their own income and savings.
Cooper’s Pen demonstrates that capacity.
The people have supplied much of the capital through their own houses.
Government’s role should be to provide the legal, planning and infrastructural framework that allows that private household investment to become part of the formal economy.
This is where the philosophy behind Barrett Town and the reality of Cooper’s Pen can meet.
MINISTER BARTLETT, TAKE THE PRINCIPLE EAST
COMAND therefore strongly supports Minister Bartlett’s integrated vision for Barrett Town and urges him and the wider Government to carry its central principle into Trelawny.
Not its scale.
Its philosophy.
Tourism development must include the people who live and work within the tourism economy.
Cooper’s Pen does not require another US$700-million development.
It requires something far less expensive and potentially just as significant: a partnership between an organised community willing to invest in itself and a Government willing to provide the limited support necessary to complete the transformation.
The residents have demonstrated their willingness to provide their own shelter.
They have demonstrated their willingness to contribute toward infrastructure.
Government should now demonstrate its willingness to meet them halfway.
Convert Cooper’s Pen from an informal settlement into a planned, serviced and sustainable community linked to the expanding tourism economy of North Trelawny.
Then Barrett Town would represent more than an impressive development announcement.
It would mark the beginning of a new philosophy of Jamaican tourism: development that does not push communities aside, but brings them along.
COMAND — Community Organizations for Management and Sustainable Development
