Barbuda Ocean Club
Barbuda Ocean Club (aka Peace Love and Happiness (PLH) owned by Discovery Land Company) is intending to be 700 luxury holiday homes in what amounts to a private gated community judging by the miles of fencing they have put up to keep us out of our own island, all along the south coast of Barbuda. Already extensively building on Coco Point’s old lease, according to their brochure there will be a ‘vibrant surf-side village’ where Coco Point once stood with homes starting at $3m. At the other end, on Palmetto hotel’s old lease, they are destroying natural wetland to build a golf course on a fragile coastline and have further objectionable plans to put a marina on the lagoon: our important, significant and protected Ramsar site. They are planning a sports park, an organic farm and heavily promote their Sea Turtle Project and Reef Renewal to offset destroying Barbuda’s previously unspoilt, pristine natural habitat. The ugly concrete dwellings are completely unsuited to the beach-side environment, only a few metres from the sea, with very little information available about who the sub-lessee/owners might turn out to be, and it’s clear there are no long-term benefits for Barbudans in this development because as happened in the Bahamas on a Discovery Land Company site we will be left with irreparable damage after the next storm.
In the short term Barbudan home-owners are now able to make a reasonable income renting their properties to large numbers of PLH contractors, and this income was much needed for Barbudans after Hurricane Irma. PLH have also worked on a number of token projects in the village, although rumours here and in Antigua suggest that their contractors are now beginning to pull out owed millions of dollars, and the billionaires are in court with each other and may be ‘running out of money’. As if billionaires ever run out of money!
There is very little opportunity for local staff development, training or promotion at Barbuda Ocean Club and so many Barbudans have left the organisation and been replaced by migrant workers from Antigua or other Caribbean islands. The deal to allocate this vast amount of land to one organisation was facilitated by the Government of Antigua and their handful of Barbudan supporters who stand to benefit most from this, as they encourage the avoidance of taxes due to the Barbuda Council in return for ‘philanthrophy’ and back-handers. Included in the deal was the new ‘international’ airport which was opened recently to allow Barbuda Ocean Club (and Nobu) guests to arrive to Barbuda in their private jets without stopping in Antigua, and exit the airport through a newly constructed and separate VIP lounge.
These and other issues have resulted in PLH/BOC/DLC being an unpopular choice for Barbudans resulting in expensive and tedious legal challenges to their actions. We are not accustomed to being forcibly excluded from areas of our land such as Palmetto wetlands, or living with people who refuse to pay the taxes they owe us, or who need to erect miles of fencing to hide behind, or who have little interest in engaging peacefully and productively with the people who have taken care of this island for over 400 years.
