Socio-cultural issues in St Lucia' s tourism

Abstract

This chapter is about tourism and the socio-cultural environment. It is concerned with the daily lives of destination people and how these are reckoned to be differentially affected by the presence of tourists. It deals with the perceptions of the visited about the visitor and whether these are predicated on socio-cultural considerations of sustainability. The setting is the island of St Lucia, a tiny 616 km2 territory situated between Martinique and St Vincent in the eastern Caribbean. In many senses, and in spite of certain idiosyncratic features, St Lucia represents a typical case of a developing microstate in the West Indies. From 1663 (when the indigenous Carib population was finally defeated) until 1803, St Lucia changed hands on 14 separate occasions between the French and the English. It remained a colony of the latter until 1967 when it was granted associated status. The island formally achieved full independence in 1979 and is currently a member of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, seeking some measure of political and economic union with nearby Dominica, St Vincent and Grenada (Ellis, 1988: 4; Wilkinson, 1993: 57). After the collapse of the sugar-cane market in 1956, there was a successful transfer to banana cultivation with guaranteed exports to Britain by Geest Industries. However, due to clashes of United States' and European commercial interests over rival supplies and subsidized pricing structures in Central America and the Caribbean, continued preferential access to the European Union under the Lome protocol appears decidedly problematic (Wilkinson, 1993: 58-59). Fortunately reliance on virtual monocrop agriculture has been alleviated by the advent of tourism, and it is this latter 'passport to development' (de Kadt, 1979) which has come to be regarded as an economic panacea.