David Jessop, Contributor

Who benefits most from crime? This seemingly simple-to-answer question may be rather more complex than it at first appears.

At the illegal end it is undoubtedly those who traffic the estimated US$40 billion of cocaine that passes annually through the region to Europe and the United States or who invest in or use the region's financial services to launder illicit money.

For legitimate business it is those who profit from the provision of services relating to interdiction, policing, forensic accounting, personal security and the many other areas of activity that relate to regional or national security.

So much so that when the legal and illegal are taken together, it may be that the business of crime is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the regional economy in size if not in terms of employment.

As recently as 20 years ago it was quite possible in most Caribbean nations to be largely immune to or ignorant of crime and its pernicious, quality-of-life diminishing effects. But today, not only is there a broad and daily awareness through the media of its impact, but a real sense that quite literally it can touch one's life.

Everyone in the region, it seems, can recount a personal experience or that of others. For example, in the last few months alone I know of a threat of extortion to a friend in a major Caribbean business and have had the misfortune to be not far from a domestic shooting incident while having dinner in an island not widely known for the possession of firearms.

Earlier this year the United Nations and the World Bank produced a joint study that tried to analyse the economic costs of crime to the region. It concluded that crime had become a central development challenge with huge costs and the capacity to diminish economic growth.

It suggested that the strongest contributory factor driving crime in the Caribbean was narcotics trafficking. This, it argued,encouraged violence, institutionalised criminal behaviour, provoked property-related crime by drug users and enabled the widespread availability of firearms. Drugs were also, the report suggested, linked directly to the corruption of many societal institutions, including government, law enforcement and business. The report observed that a result was the diversion of resources and a lessening of the effectiveness of other aspects of law and its enforcement.

Among its findings was that for business, crime, including corruption, entails additional short-term costs and has long-run consequences for commercial development as it discourages investment. It also noted that crime was of particular relevance to tourism, an industry requiring positive consumer perception.

Crime's 'benefits'?

Perhaps, understandably, the United Nations and World Bank seemed reluctant to take a broader view. For instance, they did not seek to relate their research in any depth to foreign investment or to recognise that the huge sums of money going into the tourism sector in most Caribbean nations, including those with high crime rates, would seem to suggest that investors have either discounted crime or built it into their costs. More important, the report chose to ignore the paradox that crime has a developmental effect inasmuch as it creates legitimate new industries and employment.

The two bodies also failed to observe that the many forms of criminal activity prevalent in the region have created a new and unsatisfactory interdependence whereby governments and some businesses have come to depend on its continuance.

By this I mean that narcotics interdiction, organised crime, the trafficking of weapons and people and the relationship that such activities have with money laundering and terrorism now drive policy towards the region in almost all of the nations that the Caribbean has a close and long-standing relationship with.

As a consequence, Britain, Canada, the United States, France, Holland and the European Union all provide a wide variety of financial and technical support to almost every government in the region and use security-related arguments to bolster support for broader forms of assistance.

Beyond this, there has been growth in a wide range of legitimate business activity involving both local companies and external investors.

Whether it is the trend towards public-private partnerships to build new prisons, external support with making more efficient the administration of justice, the placement of officers within law-enforcement agencies, the provision of hardware for the military and the security services, or more mundanely the development of secure transit systems for cash, crime in a sense is paying for certain aspects of Caribbean development.

In suggesting that crime has become big business and has a developmental aspect, let me stress that I am not condoning illegal activity or suggesting that criminality has any positive or redeeming quality. Rather, these comments are intended to lead to an uncomfortable truth. This is, if as may be happening, the region loses it pre-eminence as a narcotics trans-shipment point, there is a danger that as with sugar, bananas and offshore financial services, the legitimate economic benefits it has garnered may erode.

Routes to be ceased

According to Interpol, the international police agency, West Africa is fast becoming the cocaine-trafficking hub between South America and Europe. While the more traditional routes through the Caribbean are unlikely to cease, there is growing evidence that coordinated police, naval and intelligence-led activities in the region are slowing and displacing the Caribbean as a transit point.

What appears to be happening is that cocaine produced in Colombia is now being shipped through Venezuela, possibly with some support from military officers disillusioned with the Chávez government, from where it moves through neighbouring nations by sea to Ghana, Mauritania, Guinea Bissau and Senegal. There the absence of the tight controls of the kind that the nations of the Caribbean have instituted facilitate the transfer of narcotics to France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy.

This is a trend that seems set to continue, not least because the 300 tons of cocaine now trafficked from Colombia through West Africa to Europe can be sold at a price double that in the U.S.

There is, it seems, no end to the paradox that arises when small nations become moderately successful at what they set out to achieve.

David Jessop is director of the Caribbean Council. Email: david.jessop@caribbean-council.org.