Antigua-Barbuda Minister of Tourism, Harold Lovell, during his Guadeloupe visit

This double event obliged the Guadeloupean press to make a choice. So a number of our colleagues did not hesitate: they preferred to follow Dominique Bussereau, the special messenger of Jacques Chirac, the President of France.

It is the kind of event that allows us at once to know how much the Caribbean weighs in the eyes of the media of our country. When we arrived to the Cité des Métiers (Abymes) where the Antiguan minister participated in a working session together with the Guadelupean people in charge of tourism, there was just only one representative of the Guadelupean press, and it was just a cameraman from a private channel who came -- as we say in the profession --"to catch some pictures".

Arriving the day before, after journalists had waited for him for more than one hour at the airport, Dominique Buissereau, the French minister of agriculture, walked by woods and fields in Guadeloupe.  With him was a pack of Guadelupean journalists, suddenly very interested in the subject of agriculture although we knew in advance that the meetings and the other discussion of the Minister regarding the agricultural or the fishing world could, on no account, result in anything concrete.

We are in the final straight heading towards the next French presidential elections in France. Neither Mr Bussereau, nor anybody else today, can claim to know who will occupy this ministerial post. What then was the interest in this sudden visit?

Harold Lovell, coming from Antigua, had very concrete questions to submit to his hosts on the Regional Council, on the Guadeloupe Tourism Board, and other tourism experts. Guadeloupe and Antigua are geographically very close.

Nevertheless the Government of Antigua and Barbuda has realised that commercial, and tourist exchanges between our two countries were close to zero. It was, therefore, an opportunity to correct this tendency. During his full day’s visit, Harold Lovell explained that our two countries should be developing contacts.

Guadelupean tourism, almost exclusively focused on France, attracts only French tourists. They represent more than 61% of the tourist population of our country. As for Antiguans, they nearly equal the Americans and the Anglo-Saxons. It is thus a question for both countries to try to achieve a breakthrough in tourism, but also and especially to increase the exchanges between the peoples of Antigua and Guadeloupe. That is also called Caribbean cooperation. And many politicians in Guadeloupe love talking about cooperation in the Caribbean, but they never really understand how close the Caribbean from Guadeloupe is.

Victorin Lurel, president of the Regional parliament, who often says he is himself very Caribbean, sent a message to the Antiguan Minister of Tourism, in which he said that he "shared a common vision of tourism development of our territories and that tourism must be a major axis of the economic development and that good choices had to be done. A lasting tourism which provided a balance.

“It is necessary to make good choices for a durable tourism product which allows a harmonized balance between economic development; environmental protection and preservation of our cultural heritage, tourism with strong added value, which allows the largest number of our business to live with dignity on this activity.”

During the next months, this approach should be able to become a reality by more frequent exchanges between our two islands. A representative of the LIAT airline came specially to Guadeloupe, to attend this meeting.

This small Caribbean company; which has already known many setbacks, holds to the same path. If the exchanges multiplied, it could be the only beneficiary, because Air Caraïbes, the "national" Guadeloupean airline, was conspicuous by its absence, but everybody knows that this company cares little for the transport of the inhabitants of Guadeloupe to the Caribbean, a destination too far from its main concerns.