PUBLISHED| The Grift: Billioneering Off Jamaica, Not For Jamaica

By Dennis A. Minott, PhD, MISES.

July 16, 2026

The prevailing economic model in Jamaica is not development; it is a meticulously structured extraction.

 It is a system of “billioneering” off Jamaica by money-men, rather than investing in Jamaica—a reality visible behind the high, razor-wired boundary walls of our newest ultra-luxury enclaves, where a single bottle of imported champagne costs more than an average housekeeper earns in a month.

To understand the mechanics of this modern economic bypass, one must examine the structural pipelines of our two most critical national domains: tourism and energy.

The Tourism Pipeline: The Mirage of the GDP Multiplier

The traditional defence of the mega-resort model relies heavily on surface-level GDP contributions. Tourism provides significant foreign exchange and employment, for which we should be grateful. But gratitude should not preclude scrutiny.

According to IMF and Eastern Caribbean Central Bank studies, the region suffers from some of the highest tourism “leakage” rates in the world—with more than 70 to 80 cents of every tourist dollar immediately exiting the host nation to pay for imported food, foreign hotel management, foreign aviation, and overseas booking platforms (IMF, “Caribbean Tourism in the Global Economy,” 2023).

In Saint Lucia, historical analysis showed that while visitor expenditures accounted for nearly 30% of GDP, the revenue leakage through imported goods and services was more than double the industry’s actual direct contribution to government revenues (ECCB, “Tourism Leakage in the Eastern Caribbean,” 2021).

Local labour is treated as a low-cost, disposable input, while international developers repatriate tax-free profits to offshore holding companies. The domestic economy is left with environmental degradation, rising local inflation, and privatised coastlines. The physical beauty of the island is systematically monetised, but the financial yield bypasses the citizens who protect it.

The Energy Illusion: SMRs and the FOAK Fallacy

This extraction of public wealth is now being replicated in our national energy strategies. Rather than aggressively scaling up the Caribbean’s abundant, decentralised, and highly appropriate renewable resources—solar, wind, battery storage, and high-yield tropical biomass—there is a dangerous, highly subsidised push toward nuclear energy, specifically Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

Proponents argue that SMRs provide firm, weather-hardened baseload power that reduces dependence on imported fossil fuels and offers long-term price stability. These are legitimate concerns. But the question is not whether these goals are desirable; it is whether SMRs are the most prudent path to achieving them.

The financial and engineering realities of SMRs are staggeringly mismatched with the Caribbean context:

The Capital Cost Chasm: The capital expenditure (CapEx) for First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) SMRs globally ranges between $6,000 and $11,000 per kWe (IEEFA, “SMR Cost Overruns,” 2024). By stark comparison, utility-scale solar combined with battery storage typical in developing markets costs a fraction of that—averaging $1,200 to $1,800 per kW (Lazard, “Levelized Cost of Energy,” 2024).

The Grid Instability Nightmare: Electrical grids are engineered around “N-1 reliability”—the mandate that a system must survive the sudden loss of its largest single generating unit. Jamaica’s system peak load hovers between 680 MW and 730 MW, operating with an active spinning reserve margin target of roughly 150 MW (JPS, “System Operating Limits,” 2024). A standard SMR unit under commercial discussion (such as the GE Hitachi BWRX-300) produces 300 MWe. If a single 300 MWe reactor suffers a forced outage, it would instantaneously strip away over 40% of the entire island’s peak demand. Lacking massive, interconnected regional grids, an instantaneous loss of this magnitude would comfortably exceed all available spinning reserves, triggering immediate, catastrophic grid collapse and island-wide blackouts.

The Seismic Reality: The Caribbean is a tectonically active zone. In Jamaica, probabilistic seismic hazard analyses establish a baseline Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) of 0.30g to 0.40g in eastern parishes, with local faults capable of generating events exceeding magnitude 7.0 (WHOI, “Geohazard Risks in Jamaica,” 2013). Constructing nuclear infrastructure to meet International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safety standards in these conditions requires years of paleoseismological trenching and liquefaction assessments—yet policy discussions are proceeding with political reassurance rather than engineering rigour.

The Neglected Green Engines: High-Yield Tropical Biomass

The tragedy of this nuclear obsession is that it willfully ignores proven, baseload-capable tropical renewables that are ready for immediate domestic scaling. In our humid, sun-drenched climate, farmed and fermented energy crops—such as Leucaena, Barbojo, and elephant grass (Pennisetum purpureum)—can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with utility-scale solar, wind, and run-of-river hydro.

Unlike the high-tech liabilities of SMRs, these perennial biomass crops offer a triple dividend:

True Baseload Stability: Fast-growing woody legumes like Leucaena can be sustainably harvested and gasified to provide continuous, predictable power that does not suffer from solar or wind intermittency. Research indicates that Leucaena yields 20–40 dry tonnes per hectare per year, with a methane potential of approximately 200–300 m³ per dry tonne (FAO, “Tropical Forages,” 2020). A 300 MW equivalent power plant would require approximately 30,000–50,000 hectares under sustained cultivation—a substantial but not impossible commitment, given Jamaica’s 1.1 million hectares of agricultural land.

Sovereign Wealth Retention: Unlike imported uranium or foreign-patented reactor components, biomass is planted, managed, and harvested by local farmers, turning energy spend into rural agricultural jobs and keeping capital circulating entirely within the domestic economy.

Ecological Reclamation: Elephant grass and Leucaena thrive on marginal, degraded soils, acting as carbon sinks and preventing soil erosion in parishes vulnerable to heavy rainfall.

Regional Precedent: The Digital Megawatt Grab

This trend of signing unstudied, high-concept deals is a systemic Caribbean affliction. We need only look at our CARICOM neighbour, Trinidad and Tobago. The twin-island republic recently signed rapid, high-profile Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) with US firms to establish massive artificial intelligence data centres requiring a staggering 450 MWe of power along with millions of gallons of cooling water (Trinidad Guardian, “Data Centre MOU Signed,” June 2025). To agree to such resource consumption in a tropical nation already plagued by chronic water shortages and grid constraints—before any formal Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), hydrological study, or drought-resilience analysis has even been commissioned—is developmental recklessness. It is the classic Caribbean play: sign the MOU, announce the “billions in investment” to the press, and worry about the dry taps and collapsing grids later.

The Path Forward

True resilience for Jamaica requires a fundamental pivot away from extractive dependency and toward sovereign, community-owned models of development.

First, we must cap tourism tax concessions and mandate that a minimum percentage of resort supply chains—specifically agriculture, construction, and high-value services—be sourced domestically to aggressively stem the 80% capital leakage.

Second, we must halt the speculative pursuit of nuclear SMRs. Our limited fiscal space must be directed toward a decentralised, democratised grid: utility-scale solar, wind, biomass cogeneration, and distributed battery storage owned by local cooperatives, municipal bodies, and domestic enterprises.

It is time to reject the premise that Jamaica’s primary economic function is to serve as a low-cost, high-yield asset for foreign boardrooms. Genuine development does not ask a sovereign people to rent out their land, lease their coastlines, and bankrupt their treasury for the benefit of global billioneers. It demands an economy designed first, last, and always, for the people who call this island-rock our home.