The Excuse We No Longer Have

We have survived Irma. We have weathered at least two previous Middle East conflicts, oil price spikes, and pandemic shutdowns. At some point, surviving stops being enough, and building has to begin.

St. Maarten has been through this before. Every time tensions escalate in the Middle East, and they have, repeatedly, over the past two decades, we feel it here within weeks. Oil prices skyrocket. Shipping costs rise. Visitor arrivals soften. The ripple effect from a conflict thousands of miles away reaches our shores faster than any storm warning. We felt it after the Gulf War. We felt it when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and fuel prices across the Caribbean soared. We are feeling it again now.

And yet, each time, we respond as though the crisis were unexpected. We scramble. We improvise. We absorb the blow with the resilience that defines us as a people and then, when the pressure eases, we go back to business as usual. Until the next time.

Hurricane Irma did not merely destroy infrastructure. It exposed something deeper:

•That St. Martin had no institutional architecture for absorbing shocks.

•No pre-funded resilience reserve.

•No standing social registry to identify vulnerable households quickly.

•No formal protocols for government continuity when the lights go out.

•No legally binding framework that survives a change in administration.

What we had was courage, community, and improvisation, and those carried us. But they cannot be our only plan.

"Unpreparedness was forgivable the first time. After Luis, Irma, Covid, after every oil shock, after every Middle East crisis that reached our fuel pumps and our hotel bookings, it is no longer forgivable."

Institutionalizing resilience is not complicated in concept. It means passing a National Resilience Law that assigns clear roles before a crisis, not during one. It means building and maintaining a social registry so that aid reaches the right people fast. It means pre-negotiating emergency credit facilities for small businesses. It means enforcing building codes with real teeth. It means investing now in solar energy so that every future oil shock lands with less force on our electricity bills and our cost of living.

None of this is beyond Sint Maarten’s's capacity. All of it requires political will sustained across more than one election cycle — which is precisely why it must be anchored in law, not in the priorities of any single government.

The current geopolitical moment is not an anomaly. It is the world as it is, and as it will continue to be. An open, tourism-dependent island economy will always be exposed to forces beyond its control. That is not a failure, it is geography. But knowing we are exposed, and choosing not to prepare, is a failure. It is a failure of governance, and ultimately, a failure of stewardship toward the people of Sint Martin.

We have run out of excuses. It is time to build.

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Regina La Bega is a consultant at Pinnacle Consultants and a project leader on Sint Maarten's Investment Promotion Agency development initiative. Let's Talk Tourism is her regular column in The People's Tribune.

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