By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is currently writing a book about textile artisans.
A depressing email popped into my in-box last week, containing a photograph of a rubbish-choked Maafushi harbor. I know the place well, having visited at least four times and completed months of diving training there.
Maafushi is an island in the Maldives, where ‘local tourism’ is allowed. In a 2016 piece for the Dubai newspaper, The National, in Paradise done cheap: visit the Maldives without breaking the bank, I wrote:
Long a favoured destination for honeymooners and high rollers, the Maldives is seeking to broaden its appeal. Once upon a time, government policy sequestered luxury tourists on separate dedicated islands, away from the local population. This is changing, as a result of then president Mohamed Nasheed’s 2008 decision to open “local islands” to tourism.