The Mammee Bay Beach in St. Ann has served the Steer Town, Mammee Bay, Chalky Hill, Davis Town, and other surrounding communities for generations.  The community enjoyed access for fishing, vending and a wide range of recreational activities for over 60 years.

In recent years there has been an acceleration to restrict and block the public right to have access to the Caribbean sea in Jamaica.  Jamaica, an island, is rapidly becoming a landlocked people that will be barricaded away from our own beautiful shores.  We will be unable to exercise the ancient right to enjoy our precious beaches.   The coastline from Negril in Westmoreland to Manchioneal in Portland is approximately 169 miles and is under threat of privatization.  Nearly all of Jamaica's coast is privately held by wealthy hotel developers. This is tantamount to blatant discrimination of the Jamaican people that has gone unchecked by successive governments.  Our fragile coast is now a more exclusive economic zone designed for marketability at the expense of the Jamaican people whose rights and liberty has been ignored. These practices are discriminatory and environmentally destructive.

The Mammee Bay Fishing and Recreational beach is one of the last free strips of beach in St. Ann (Home of Bob Marley, Burning Spear and Marcus Garvey),approximately 3.5 miles west of Ocho Rios. There is planned development for the Mammee Bay beach that will terminate all Fishing and beach recreational activities.  The developers  are aggressively pursuing  the development of their project that will forever change the coastline and restrict access rights of the neighboring communities.

The Jamaican government needs to pass an open beach law declaring all land below the vegetation line as belonging to the country for use by the people.  This will restore the ancient right of the public to the foreshore.  This was a right dating back from Roman civil law and was incorporated into English common law.  

To protect the Mammee Bay Beach we need the assistance of the Jamaican government, NEPA and civil society  to help the community secure their beach access rights and save the beach. 

Please help to save the Mammee Bay beach by telling officials that you do not support the privatization and planned development of structures that will make a public space an exclusive area that will only benefit a few.

Please let us unite. We fight for OUR BEACHES, We fight for OUR LAND, We fight for ECONOMIC JUSTICE,  We fight for FREEDOM OF JAMAICAN BEACHES.

SAVE MAMMEE BAY BEACH