Three Caribbean nations on the list of the top 10 most ethical travel destinations in the world - 2013

Bahamas Among 10 Most Ethical Destinations

by Ianthia Smith
Jones Bahamas
Nassau, The Bahamas


The Bahamas has been voted one of the top 10 most ethical travel destinations in the world, according to non-profit organisation Ethical Traveler.

The 2013 report noted that The Bahamas won its way onto the list by making efforts to reduce human trafficking and expand national parks and protected areas, such as the Andros West Side National Park, which grew from 882,000 acres to nearly 1.3 million acres.

In addition to more standard criteria like unspoiled natural beauty and authentic cultural experiences, researchers judged destinations on 35 metrics in four categories: environment protection, social welfare, human rights, and for the first time, animal welfare.

“In other words, judges considered quality of drinking water in the category of environmental protection, women’s rights in the category of human rights, and so on,” the report read.

The complete top 10 list for 2013, in alphabetical order, includes The Bahamas, Barbados, Cape Verde, Chile, Dominica, Latvia, Lithuania, Mauritius, Palau and Uruguay.

Ethical Traveler does not rank the countries within the top 10.

“The Bahamas was also awarded for its intention to set aside 20 per cent of its territorial waters as marine protects areas; the government achieved results in the proactive identification and assistance of trafficking victims and launched its first prosecution under its human trafficking law; The Bahamas gets top ratings for both political rights and civil liberties overall in the 2013 scores,” the report added.

“The constitution, other laws, and domestic policies protect religious freedom and, in practice, the government generally respected religious freedom. The constitution provides for freedom of speech and press, and the government generally respected these rights in practice. The Bahamas has an independent press and a relatively effective – albeit extremely backlogged – judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system and a number of domestic and international human rights groups generally operated without government restriction.”

While The Bahamas made its way onto the list, the country lost points in several areas.

“The government has not yet reported a conviction of a trafficking offender,” the 2013 Ethical Traveler report read. “Reported incidents of police killings of six people in disputed circumstances and the failure to adhere to the call by the UN to stop involuntary returns of Haitian nationals; poor ratings for gender inequality according to the UN; the criminal code still discriminates against gay, lesbian and bisexual people in that the legal age of consent to engage in homosexual conduct is 18 years, while the legal age of consent to engage in heterosexual conduct is 16 years.”

Three countries that fell off the list from 2013 – Costa Rica, Ghana and Samoa – slid backward on key metrics such as environmental protection and human rights violations.

“We feel that we can make a difference in those countries because they really want to try to do the right thing,” Ethical Traveler’s Founder and Executive Director Jeff Greenwald said. “If we can send more travellers there because of their good policies, we think they’ll really stand up and take notice.”

March 13, 2014

The Bahama Journal

The G7 passes the buck to the G20

• Impossible to certify the end of capitalism’s global crisis

Joaquín Rivery Tur

THEY may be the 20 countries with the most economic weight in the world, but they are not wizards, nor are their computers fortune-tellers. Nobody on the planet can sign the death certificate of capitalism’s global crisis. What just took place in Pittsburgh, in the United States, is best described as buck passing.

The Group of Eight (G8: United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, France and Italy plus Russia) was unable to deal with the global crisis, much less with controlling the tangled neoliberal financial web of the capitalist system, and had no choice but to pass it on to the Group of 20, possibly to dilute the responsibility of the world’s most developed countries for the economic turmoil into which the planet has sunk, and to look to another 12 nations to share the blame.

In reality, the Pittsburgh Summit represents the total failure of the richest nations in their desire to rule and exploit a world that is totally ungovernable for two reasons; one, the social movements are increasingly up in arms over the generalized injustice and, two; the large financial corporations have rooted their power within the highest layers of officials, so as to have free reign for their profit ambitions and, therefore, they cannot be controlled. Governments have always been accomplices.

According to the news agencies, the leaders of the G20 — within which the seven richest nations have greater ability to exert pressure, more influence and the power to coerce — agreed that the new group is to be transformed into "a principal forum for international economic cooperation."

That is an ambiguous sentence. It assumes that the fundamental purpose of the meeting was to collectively attain greater control over financial corporations in order to avert – as far as possible – the risks of a crisis as profound as the one humanity is currently experiencing. In fact, in order to do so, the seven richest countries demonstrated their will to increase by at least 5% the voting power of emerging countries — such as China, India, Brazil and others — within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as if that could actually change the relationship of forces, and above all, as if the move signifies a major change in the international financial architecture, which the underdeveloped countries have been demanding.

The summit called for stricter regulations on banking activities and limiting bonuses paid to banking/financing executives, who had the power to raise their own bonuses by millions, even in cases where their companies were showing losses that resulted in bankruptcy.

The problem is that a 5% increase in voting power for emerging countries does not mean, for example, that the United States will lose its veto power in the IMF or the World Bank. Instead, it retains a strong lever of pressure, mostly on the Third World, which desperately needs help and investments to pull it out of underdevelopment, but without those nations becoming part of the crazy model of U.S. consumption, which is leading the world to environmental destruction due to climate change and the depredation of nature.

The measures approved in Pittsburgh are an attempt to avoid the phenomena that led to the formation of financial bubbles with a tremendous capacity for explosion and the creation of new crises, but the most serious problem will be how to really control the financial giants, and how to dictate mandatory regulations to govern their fraudulent operations. Is that possible in unbridled capitalism?

It is very difficult not to hold the IMF responsible in good part for what is happening internationally, because its experts should have realized that the financial bubble was about to burst.

On top of the repeated affirmations about how everybody is supposedly emerging from the crisis, in a contradictory fashion, the G20 agreed not to withdraw government aid packages to the major corporations because of a risk of another downturn. Even Chinese President Hu Jintao stated that the alleged recovery "is not as yet solid," and he wasn’t exactly referring to his own country, where not even the crisis has been able to deter its booming economic growth.

Apparently, nobody has learned anything. The G8 (which still exists) has incorporated another group of countries into its vicissitudes, but even that is not a solution, because it is a question of agreements within capitalist globalization, whose neoliberal character is incompatible with government controls. Nevertheless, protectionism is still growing.

The big banks want deregulation, absolute freedom to cheat and take risks in order to satisfy the adrenaline needs produced by financial speculators’ ambition for profits.

With respect to the famous bail-out, in early September, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in Washington revealed that in the second quarter, banks with capitalization and bad loan problems (impossible to collect) totaled 416; in other words, 111 more than in the previous period. A very befogged atmosphere.

The IMF put the frosting on the cake of the crisis a few days ago, when it announced that the planet-wide financial hurricane will affect economic growth for at least seven years, and suggested — now! — the implementation of structural reforms. The result of the crisis forecast by everybody is less employment, less growth, less investment and less productivity. The problem is not one of phenomenon, but of essence. It is called capitalism, no matter how many times you spin the wheel.

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