Market-led Development versus Basic Needs: Common Property and the Common Good in St. Lucia

• Main Author: Jack Thornburg
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Lindenwood University 2011-04-01
• Series: Journal of International and Global Studies
• Online Access: http://www.lindenwood.edu/jigs/docs/volume2Issue2/essays/1-20.pdf

This paper argues that contemporary development policies have failed to solve the problem of the maldistribution of economic resources, poverty, underemployment, and skewed income distribution. With the collapse of the Lomé Convention in 1996, St. Lucia saw its banana export market suffer a steep decline. Since then, Lomé St. Lucia has focused on market-led international tourism as the new engine of growth. Market-led development is fraught with economic cycles of up and down that lead to economic uncertainty and catastrophe for many people of limited resources. Much government revenue is spent on tourist-oriented infrastructure at the expense of a well-funded social security system. A new, morally oriented economic philosophy is called for at this time. The focus should be on a basic-needs approach and the welfare of the population rather than the needs of the market for continual growth and profit. In this regard, the paper examines the role of family land tenure in providing a common good to help alleviate the hardships of economic downturn. For thousands of co-owning heirs that may need refuge from the vagaries of the international market, family land can provide temporary economic or subsistence shelter. With an economy of limited opportunity, government policy informed by a sense of moral obligation should encourage family land as a form of social security for those numerous co-owners working in off-farm enterprises such as tourism, in which economic uncertainty is ever present.