We shouldn’t surrender our beaches

THE EDITOR, Madam:

I commend Danielle Archer for her searing and nationally vital column in The Sunday Gleaner of April 5 titled ‘Jamaica’s Unspoken Emergency’. In a time of unsettling civic somnolence, she has stood as a sentinel – alert, unafraid, and morally anchored. She has sounded an alarm that too many of us have long chosen not to hear.

Her central claim that Jamaica’s people have been effectively dispossessed of their coastline, with access to the commons reduced to a shocking fraction, must not be dismissed as rhetorical flourish. It resonates deeply with ongoing public concern that access to beaches has been steadily constrained, often treated not as an inherent right but as a conditional privilege mediated by licensing, fees, or private control .

This is, as Archer correctly frames it, a quiet but profound erosion of birthright. A nation of sea and shore is being slowly estranged from its own edge. The tragedy is both material and psychological: the narrowing of access points is also a narrowing of identity, belonging, and dignity.

What Archer has done courageously is to move this issue from the margins of murmured complaint into the centre of national consciousness. In doing so, she joins that rare class of Caribbean voices willing to incur the “cost of courage” in societies where silence is often safer than truth .

But her intervention must now catalyse a structured scholarly response. Jamaica urgently needs comparative, evidence-based studies situating the island’s coastal access within the experience of similar jurisdictions: Barbados, Mauritius, Costa Rica, and even Mediterranean states, where public shoreline rights are constitutionally protected. How do their legal frameworks treat the foreshore? What proportion of coastline remains genuinely accessible? What governance models prevent enclosure?

Such work should draw on legal scholarship, environmental economics, spatial mapping, and historical land-tenure analysis. It should quantify not only access but exclusion. It should expose how policy, capital, and inertia converge to transform commons into commodities.

Archer has rung the bell. The academy, civil society, and Parliament must now respond.

For if we fail to act, we will have to confront an indictment far harsher than hers: that a people surrounded by sea quietly surrendered their shore.

DENNIS MINOTT, PhD