A lone paddleboarder glides across calm aquamarine water as “yachties” steer a tiny dinghy towards the shoreline’s pristine sands. It’s a picture-perfect Caribbean vista – but behind the idyllic scene lies a troubling reality. Barbuda, a tiny low-lying island 23km long and 12km wide, is in the grip of a modern-day version of a gold rush.
The treasure in question is its unspoilt, almost empty beaches and crystal-clear waters. The rush to exploit it is devastating: bulldozed sand dunes and dredged wetlands, private communities constructed on top of turtle-nesting beaches – a precarious ecosystem and culture under threat as luxury developments are constructed for the ultra-wealthy.
“They want the whole waterfront area,” says John Mussington, chairman of the island’s local government, the Barbuda Council, gesturing down the beach towards one of the most high-profile developments, part-owned by Robert De Niro. “Everything will be fenced off because the properties will be owned by the millionaires so they can enjoy their private lifestyle. That means they don’t want to see people like me.”
De Niro’s $250 million development is just one of a number of projects under construction on Barbuda, the smaller, more remote, island of a former British colony, Antigua and Barbuda.
READ MORE
In an interview with the New York Times in January, De Niro and his partners said their project would respect the island’s ecosystem and protect it from hurricanes.
Katy Horne, Paradise Found’s managing director, said the design and construction adhered to Miami-Dade hurricane building code standards. She said the one-storey buildings would be set back from the flood plain and that dunes, mangroves and other vegetation would protect against winds and water surges.
De Niro and his business partner, Australian billionaire James Packer, are building on the site of the abandoned K Club resort, where Princess Diana once famously holidayed, naming it Paradise Found when they first set their sights on it.
Mussington smiles wryly at that. “Imagine a millionaire coming to find what they think is their paradise. We have been stewards over this island for years. Now that you’re realising what we have done to create this paradise, you’re coming back in the form of what you call luxury tourism and real estate speculation, to use up the resources, exhaust it, and just discard us again? We have to say no to that. It is colonisation 2.0.”
Barbudans are the descendants of enslaved Africans, who, after emancipation in 1834, were left to live on the island, primarily because it was wild and scrubby and seen as unsuitable for much else.
Since then Barbudans have communally governed the island, a practice that was codified in national law in 2007. The system of customary land tenure is the reason Barbuda has remained an unspoilt Caribbean island, where people practise hunting, fishing, living from the land and, importantly, are not dependent on tourism for economic survival.
Now, all of this is under threat under the guise of “sustainable” tourism.
Despite contributing very little to global greenhouse gas emissions, the Caribbean is expected to be severely affected by climate change in the coming years.
Rising sea levels and increasingly severe tropical storms all make coastal developments – and tourism – even more vulnerable. It is through this lens that many locals say it is a folly to force Barbuda to become dependent on tourism.
Such over-reliance is a region-wide concern, which has been exacerbated by the impact of climate change. In Antigua, tourism accounts for about 60 per cent of GDP, making it the largest sector of the economy.
When Covid hit, Antigua was badly affected, but in Barbuda, because the people are largely self-sustaining, the impact was not felt as much. Barbuda, however, has long been considered an economic opportunity by the country’s central government. When Hurricane Irma, a devastating category-five storm, hit the region in 2017, it provided a pathway for prime minister Gaston Browne’s administration to make good on its long-signalled intent to turn the island into a millionaires’ playground.
As Barbudans endured a forced evacuation from their island, the government overturned their customary land rights and moved heavy machinery on to the island, not to rebuild for locals but to carve out space in a pristine forest for a new airport runway.
Frustratingly for locals, this same government leads climate change advocacy on the international stage and is a prominent member of Small Island Developing States (Sids), which the Irish Government funds to assist small island nations to overcome climate issues.
Last year Barbudans protested at the annual Sids conference, which was held in Antigua and Barbuda’s capital St John’s, highlighting serious concerns due to the lack of grassroots representation, specifically of Barbudan land defenders and the Barbuda Council.
Jackie Frank, an elected member of the Barbuda Council, says Barbudans are a proud people who simply want to retain control of their island’s destiny.
“All Barbudans are land defenders,” the soft-spoken retired teacher says. Being a land defender took Frank and Mussington to the highest court in the region in 2023. Their case began as a legal challenge to the airport construction, which took place without consultation, and ended up as an appeal in the UK’s Privy Council in London, the highest court for Antigua and Barbuda. Ironically, this colonial-era institution provided the justice their domestic courts had denied.
“What the privy court ruling means,” says Frank, “is that whether it’s me or Mussi or whoever, can stand up and say, I don’t agree with that. I want to see the documents. I want the information ... We have the right just to complain, to have a voice. That’s what was confirmed [by the Privy Council].”
Frank and Mussington were represented in court by the Global Legal Action Network (Glan), a Galway- and London-based legal advocacy nonprofit organisation. Glan represents a number of litigants on Barbuda and has lodged complaints with international human rights bodies on behalf of the land defenders.
Local fisherman George Jeffery has spent his life living in harmony with the Codrington Lagoon, an internationally protected area and the nesting colony of the frigatebird, a critically endangered species and the national bird of Antigua and Barbuda.
His case accuses the authorities of bypassing planning laws and failing to protect the fragile ecosystem. Miranda Beazer, who ran a beachfront business on the famous Princess Diana Beach since 1992, until it was damaged in Irma, is another litigant. She planned to rebuild her business, but says that one day she got a call to say it was being bulldozed. She’s now embroiled in a legal case with the Peace, Love and Happiness (PLH) development project, part owned by billionaire John Paul DeJoria.
“It’s frustrating at times,” says Beazer. “It’s like David versus Goliath, because I feel as if I’m on my own sometimes with the pain and the suffering. I want to put back up the structures that were there before. I want it to be useful for our own people. We are always talking about the beachfront being developed for foreigners.
“What’s wrong with Barbudans owning a beachfront property to make ends meet? Barbudans are not supposed to be in such positions to be owning beachfront properties … but you cannot come to a Caribbean island and be dictating things like that.”
Dispossession
The inequity Beazer describes is visible at every turn. The island’s village, Codrington, still bears the scars of Irma – abandoned wooden houses dot the landscape, while developers criss-cross the dusty roads with their large machinery to build million-dollar villas.
Director of Glan, Dr Gearóid Ó Cuinn, contends that Barbuda’s fragile ecosystems and the self-determination of its people are being “sacrificed at the altar of elite profit”.
“Private developers are constructing gated communities on top of ecologically sensitive areas, disregarding both the rights of the local population and the environmental protections that should be in place. The state’s complicity in enabling this destruction raises serious legal and ethical questions – this is not development, it’s dispossession.”
But even as legal challenges continue apace, so too does the construction and everything that comes along with it: restricted access to beaches, military-style security on the island, disruption of a simple way of life that has coexisted with its fragile ecosystem for generations.
Mussington says Barbudans are not against progress, they just want to see a gentler type of tourism, one that protects the island and benefits future generations, not unseen millionaires who swoop in on helicopters and private jets.
“It boils down to whether or not we intend to continue living on the island as Barbudans,” says Mussington. “At the end of the day, in order for us to continue to live sustainably on the island, something has to be done in terms of this development policy. It is not sustainable, it’s a threat to the island itself, and it’s a threat to the people in terms of being able to survive here ... In other words, if this continues, the island wouldn’t be a paradise any more.”
The government of Antigua and Barbuda has consistently denied allegations of land grabs and disaster capitalism and did not respond to requests to comment on these issues.
– This reporting was facilitated by a grant from the Simon Cumbers Media Fund.
