Saturday, January 9, 2010

Halting rural migration in Saint Lucia

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Useful article Frank. As you've suggested, stemming rural-urban drift is not easy especially in small, island, developing States like ours. Quite apart from the economic issues such as the size, pace and spread of economic growth and the balanced geographic distribution of the benefits of such growth, there are the psycho-social issues. People will move to any place that promises them jobs and a better quality of life, even though that promise may take a while to be fulfilled. The high number of retail businesses we've had, have tended to go with that flow. This partly explains why the drift into Castries was higher in the days when rural agriculture was at its peak. Various strategies have been used to induce investment into the rural areas such as the establishment of industrial estates in Vieux-Fort and Dennery and hotels in Vieux-fort and Soufriere. My sense is that the drift slowed when these estates were at full production but rose again as factories closed. The rapid growth of the north-east corridor and the South over the past 20 years (in terms of resident population) is a good sign. Businesss, albeit of the retail/service type are moving into these areas, so much so that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between rural and urban areas in the north. The remaining weak points are along the east coast (between Castries and Vieux-fort and the west coast (Castries and Soufriere). The completion of the El Paradis resort is crucial to stemming the rural-urban drift from Dennery, Micoud and environs. But other factors such as proper roads, access to health services and decentralization of Government services are also critical to containing the drift.

CSI

January 9, 2010 at 8:25 AM
Anonymous said...

Blame it on Compton, he only cared about for North and if he could, he would have moved the international airport to the north. He was a very vengeful person because most of the south didn't vote for him, I guess now it's getting too crowded in the north.

January 9, 2010 at 11:16 AM
Anonymous said...

only cared about the north

January 9, 2010 at 12:27 PM
Anonymous said...

Compton is not to be blamed. He did his best to spread social and eocnomic development around the ocuntry. It was he who built the Industrial estates and who upgraded Hewanorra Airport. And he improved the Castries Vieux-fort highway. When he became Chief Minister, Castries and the north were already the most populous parts of the country. He could not have ignored this. He had to create jobs for the people who were already there. In any event Sir John is now well dead, so too are former leaders George Charles, and Winston Cenac. We can blame them for every present ill but that will do us little good. We have to fix the problems we now face, and not give our children cause to blame us.

January 9, 2010 at 1:13 PM

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