Fedee Calls For United Growth

WHILE numerous regional businesses continue to capitalise on the temporary collapse of Dominica’s business and agriculture sector following the passage of Hurricane Maria last month, one government minister is looking forward to them to grow as one.

Tourism Minister Dominic Fedee stated this week that the island’s downfall is nothing to celebrate, and benefitting from this unfortunate event is currently not one of his focal points.

The islands of the Caribbean, he said, tend to be looked at as one, and so when one falls, all suffer.

Instead, he said neighbouring islands should put their heads together and work as one in order to see the entire Caribbean revive from the trauma caused by the two Category 5 hurricanes — Maria and Irma.

Fedee said: “I think that I’m more interested in seeing the Caribbean together as a region coming back strong. We can send a very strong message to the international travel community, consumers who trade, and our stakeholders that we’re back, we’re open for business, and we are resilient people.”

He added: “We’ve overcome from a very serious and phenomenal disaster – I say phenomenal because this hurricane season has been a phenomenon. We haven’t seen anything like it in my lifetime because the frequency and the velocity of the storms that we have seen is quite rare in our history.”

Fedee said the passage of Maria placed tremendous demand on the marketing capacity of the respective islands, adding that now is the opportune time to pay serious attention to regional marketing.

“None of us have the resources on our own to do a complete job in addressing the concerns that would surround travelling to the Caribbean,” he said. “What we need to do now is construct this from a regional perspective, pull our resources together so that we’re stronger, and we can do a proper job, especially in our key markets like the United Kingdom, which remains very critical to a lot of our islands in the Eastern Caribbean.”