Jamaica beach activists sue over loss of public access to coast

Devon Taylor remembers when the Mammee Bay shoreline in St Ann, Jamaica, was filled with children swimming after school, fishers selling their catch and vendors carving souvenirs under almond trees.

“I grew up on Mammee Bay,” Taylor says. He recalls fetching seawater for his grandmother, learning to swim in the shallows and watching fishers cast their nets. “That beach raised us. It fed us.”

Today Mammee Bay is the center of his campaign against an all-inclusive tourism model that the government calls the backbone of the economy. Taylor and other activists call it “plantation tourism” that benefits visitors and a small elite.

In 2019, locals were locked out by a fence and armed guards hired by investors building luxury hotels, Taylor says. The community tore down the fence, but after Covid restrictions they returned to find concrete walls. The standoff turned violent, he says, with gunshots fired to break up protests.

Taylor is the founder of the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement. “When you cut us off from the sea … you are actually setting us up to starve,” he says.

Mammee Bay, Little Dunn’s River, the Blue Lagoon, Bob Marley beach and Flankers beach are now the subject of five court cases, with the first trial set for later this month.

Each site has its own story, Taylor says, but all involve communities denied access to places with social, economic and spiritual meaning. He traces the problem to colonial-era land rules retained after independence in 1962, including the 1956 Beach Control Act that gives the state control of the foreshore.

In Portland, campaigners say officials closed the Blue Lagoon in 2022, promising to reopen it in 90 days with better facilities. They later learned the plan was to block public roads for private villas. Colin Beckford, president of the Blue Lagoon Alliance, says the lagoon has sustained nearby communities for generations. Wilbourn Carr, 73, says the site is also used for its mineral spring.

In Flankers, activists have filed an injunction to stop construction in the sea. “Our foreparents shed blood for this land,” says campaigner Olando Brown. “We shouldn’t be forced to fight for what is already ours.”

In Little Dunn’s River, Jabbem director Damion Coombs says locals generate tourism revenue but gain little from it. He compares the claim that restricted access protects the industry from crime to colonial arguments for keeping out locals.

Environment Minister Matthew Samuda said the government is committed to public benefit from natural assets. He cited new beach parks in Montego Bay and St James and said recent approvals require corridors to the sea. He noted that rocky shores and wetlands limit access in many places.

In March, Prime Minister Andrew Holness proposed a beach access policy to update the law. Campaigners say it still allows fees and limits. Coombs says the group wants “free, legal, unfettered, forever rights.”

Jabbem also opposes the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority Act passed in March, which it says weakens the Prescription Act that protects long-used public paths. Samuda said the law speeds rebuilding after Hurricane Melissa without removing oversight.

Taylor says the movement is not partisan. Shadow environment minister Omar Newell said successive governments have allowed privatization of beaches and that it must stop.

Taylor, an immunologist with a PhD in biochemistry, calls himself an anti-colonial fighter. “I am a Rastafarian and a son of Jamaica,” he says, “and so this movement has driven me to become an environmental defender, but also an anti-colonial fighter, fighting against the vestiges of colonialism and the colonial logic of land dispossession.”