KINGSTON, Jamaica — In a sharp rebuke delivered during Tuesday’s Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives, opposition tourism spokesperson Andrea Purkiss has called into question the Jamaican government’s flagship tourism diversification strategy, accusing incumbent Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett of peddling a harmful “diversification myth” that has wasted hundreds of billions of Jamaican dollars with little to show for the investment. For years, Bartlett has framed the island nation’s overreliance on the U.S. travel market — which supplies more than 80% of all visitors to Jamaica — as an existential economic vulnerability. The minister first amplified this concern during the COVID-19 pandemic, when border closures and travel restrictions in North America brought Jamaica’s core tourism industry to a near-standstill. On multiple occasions, he has argued that over-dependence on U.S. and Canadian travelers leaves Jamaica exposed to external shocks ranging from foreign policy changes to flight cancellations and public health advisories, framing diversification as not just a policy choice, but a matter of long-term economic survival. As the centerpiece of his five-point plan to grow the tourism sector, Bartlett pledged to open new visitor corridors across emerging markets: the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and other regions disconnected from North America’s economic cycles. But Purkiss says the results of years of investment tell a very different story. Since 2015, the tourism ministry has allocated a total of J$2.86 billion to so-called “seat support” programs — taxpayer-funded subsidies designed to incentivize airlines to add new routes to these non-traditional markets. Purkiss argues that this massive spending has produced negligible returns. To back up her critique, she laid out concrete arrival data for each of Bartlett’s priority emerging markets: For the Middle East corridor Bartlett promoted during high-profile trips to Riyadh and Dubai, the net increase in visitor arrivals by the end of 2025 was just 330 people. Following Bartlett’s 2021 publicity-heavy trip to Nigeria, billed as opening a “historic gateway” for African travelers, net growth in visitor numbers from the region hit only 320, bringing total African arrivals to just 1,440. Even a push to tap India, one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing outbound travel markets, yielded only an additional 360 visitors. All told, these years of investment in new markets have delivered less than half a percent of Jamaica’s total annual visitor arrivals, with most new routes still operating well below capacity. “That is not diversification. That is expensive theatre,” Purkiss told parliament, noting that many of the subsidized new routes continue to fly with massive numbers of empty seats, failing to deliver the consistent visitor growth Bartlett promised. Echoing a common Jamaican idiom, she argued that while Bartlett’s rhetoric around diversification has been prolific, the costly policy has delivered no meaningful economic benefit to the island. Purkiss called on the minister to publicly account for the billions in taxpayer spending that has yielded such underwhelming results, putting renewed pressure on the government to defend its tourism strategy ahead of upcoming budget reviews.