Notice how the blacklists go in only one direction from the Global North to small countries in the Global South! Good point, where is the WTO in stopping this all? Oh, but again it only represents the global north.

You meet one new "blacklist demand", another alphabet group just makes (another) new one, and in any event nothing guarantees country x nor bank y from not doing business with you in any event!

Thus the whole premise of giving in to this extortion makes no sense (the ethics of it notwithstanding in the first place).

I wonder if the Central Bank will address the issue of identity fraud and credit bureaus that get hacked in the US and then offer their clients "insurance" products against the misuse of said data by others?

You often have to be able to sue in the US to get bad info removed, so I wonder what lessons were learned from how this well or not well this all works in the US.

We are already far below the minimum distances required to achieve reproduction as the article says in all but the most remote places. Thus you can only do a complete moratorium for a period of time and hope the distances get back to within what the conch need. Continuing the fishery is just wiping out the remaining adults (at possibly a slower pace with the end result the same as doing nothing). The measures mentioned would have been possibly appropriate 10-20 years ago.

At this point an export ban would just be tinkering with the problem. A full moratorium on all harvests would be necessary, read in the article just how bad it is. Fines or this or that export rule will just not solve the problem. You need enough conch for mating and reproduction or you have no conch. You can't just have 10% "less" conch.

The Galapagos has done well with invasive animal removal, on an island, its actually not too hard it just needs the funding, the procedures are well down now.

Well, that would be up to the RBDF. Its not hard with modern radars to detect boats, and then seize and sell them to in part pay for operations.

Not sure how you can exempt Bahamians from responsobility if Conch go, given these are our waters. The choice is ours to make for there are still conch now, and its up to us to let them go or do something about it which would mean the moves I mentioned.

I asked a marine expert once how bad he was.

He told me we have only 10% of the original pre discovery by Europeans amount of conch and we take out 10X more than is sustainable. And this was probably eight years ago, so the situation is no doubt much worse.

So realistically we'd need a no conch catching holiday for probably 10 years to allow the population to recover, along with permanent no conch taking zones to allow a serious chance of conch survival.

On another note the Bahamas needs an Endangered Species Act. I hope if we do one we'll learn from all the mistakes other countries did with theirs, which namely is to allow politicians over scientists to control the process.

Step 1. OECD et al make "demands"

Step 2. We comply

Step 3. OECD et al makes new demands

(Process repeats)

Complying with Step 1 does not get you anywhere and does not avoid Step 3.

Everything he says is true. We never should have started the cycle.

It would appear that low and behold we can not as a region grow with cruise ships comprising an ever growing percentage of our main industry? Now that's a shocker.

If your visitors counts are UP and you are making LESS money per person then something is well WRONG folks.