In October, a Jamaican court issued an injunction preventing the government from restricting public access to Little Dunn's River beach in St Ann parish — a rare legal win for the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (Jabbem) in its campaign to abolish the 1956 Beach Control Act. The act transferred ownership of Jamaica's foreshore and seabed to the state, which has since parcelled coastline to luxury hotel developers while charging Jamaicans entrance fees to reach their own beaches. The structural mechanism is straightforward: a colonial-era statute concentrates a public natural asset — the coastline — in state hands, which then licenses it to foreign-capital tourism operators. Those operators capture the revenue; Jamaicans supply cheap labour and lose recreational access. Dr Devon Taylor, the immunologist who founded Jabbem in 2020, calls this 'plantation tourism': exclusion enforced through law, cheap labour extracted through economic necessity, environmental costs externalised to communities. Environment minister Matthew Samuda defended the model on economic grounds, citing tourism as Jamaica's largest foreign exchange earner and the main income source for nearly 200,000 Jamaicans. He framed beach restrictions as crime prevention — Little Dunn's River was closed after a murder — and pointed to a 2026 beach access policy intended to modernise legislation. But Taylor noted the Beach Control Act predates Jamaica's crime crisis by decades and was never designed as a security tool. The murder remains unsolved four years later; access remains restricted to weekends only. The government's proposed 2026 policy, published in March by Prime Minister Andrew Holness, was supposed to address the access gap. Campaigners and the Jamaica Environment Trust's Dr Theresa Rodriguez-Moodie say it still permits unacceptable restrictions. The fundamental architecture — state ownership of foreshore, discretionary licensing to private operators — remains intact. Australian marathon swimmer Eva Buzo, who completed an 11-hour swim to One Man Beach in Montego Bay in solidarity with Jabbem, pointed to functioning counter-models. Australia and Barbados maintain universal public beach access alongside thriving tourism industries. The question isn't whether tourism and public access can coexist — they do elsewhere — but whether Jamaica's political economy permits the transition. The economics of the current arrangement are revealing. High entrance fees and mandatory on-site food purchases at privatised beaches function as a regressive tax on leisure for working-class Jamaicans. Jabbem's western Jamaica coordinator Monique Christie argued that the actual tourism product is Jamaican people and culture, not hotel rooms — meaning the segregation model degrades the very asset it monetises. The government has said it will appeal the Little Dunn's River injunction. The case is one of several Jabbem has filed challenging the Beach Control Act's constitutionality. Wilbourn Carr, 73, fighting a separate beach access case in Portland parish, said the injunction offered hope precisely because a judge acknowledged the principle that Jamaicans should have access to their own coastline. The legal fight is far from over, but the extraction pattern — colonial law enabling private capture of a public commons — is now visible in court.
