“Jamaica is the third largest island and the largest English-speaking island in the Caribbean Sea. The size of Jamaica is about 160 kilometers (90 miles) south of Cuba and has an area of 10,990 square kilometers (4,243 square miles) and a total coastline of 1,022 kilometers (634 miles). Jamaica emerged from the ocean in the mid-Miocene, thus it was never connected to any other landmass. Jamaica dry forests are subtropical dry forests located in southern Jamaica. In southern Jamaica, the most extensive dry forests occur in the limestone hills of the Hellshire Hills in St. Catherine and Portland Ridge in Clarendon. Jamaican dry forests is an ecoregion that covers a minority of the land area of the nation island of Jamaica, which ranks fifth among the Earth’s islands in terms of endemic plant life. More than twenty species of endemic birds and more than on any other Caribbean Basin island as well as numerous endemic reptiles and amphibians live in Jamaica dry forests. Therefore, this ecoregion is very important to wildlife species and ecosystem. Nowadays, Jamaica dry forests are being damaged due to deforestation, widespread plantation agriculture and other population-related development.”
POPULATION
“In 1990, population of Jamaica was 2,466,100, it increased 7.5 percent to approximately 2,652,689 in July of 2000. In 2000 the birth rate stood at 18.51 per 1,000 while the death rate stood at 5.51 per 1,000. With a projected annual population growth rate of 0.9 percent between 1997 and 2015, the population is expected to reach 2.9 million by the year 2015. Most of the Jamaican is African descent, about 90.9 percent, and 7.3 percent of the population is mixed race people. Youth dominated the population of Jamaica as 30 percent are below the age of 14 and only 7 percent of the population older than 65. 63 percent of Jamaicans are expected to live in urban areas in 2015, especially in Kingston, the capital city of Jamaica. The rest of people are more willing to live in Kingston’s suburbs.”
ECONOMY: MINING
“Mining is the primary industry in Jamaica. Jamaica has natural resources, primarily bauxite, therefore, bauxite, alumina and raw materials used in the production of aluminum, are the country’s main exports. 1960s – 1980s, Jamaica was the world’s largest producer of bauxite. Nowadays, it still is the world’s third largest producer of bauxite, after Australia and Guinea, and has estimated reserves of more than 1.9 billion metric tons. Mining is a very important industry to Jamaica over the early years. By 1970, mining’s contribution to GDP reached 15.7 percent. In the years since, the industry’s contribution to Jamaica’s GDP remained at about 10 percent. However, in 1980s and 1990s, foreign companies withdrew from the island, and the government bought into the industry, thus keeping profits at home.”
ECONOMY: MANUFACTURING:
“Manufacturing is the second industry in Jamaica. Although this sector is declining, it is still and important contributor to the Jamaican economy. Manufacturing accounted for 19.6 percent of GDP in 1988, it had fallen to 18.1 percent in 1996. Total employment in manufacturing in 1996 stood at 100,400 people, or 8.7 percent of the labor force. Beginning in the 1980s, apparel production replaced sugar, food beverages, and tobacco, became the dominant manufacturing activity in the nation, employing 35,000 people in the early 1990s. Production was greatly increased when U.S. companies began exporting their apparel assembly to countries such as Jamaica, which could assemble clothing at far lower prices than in the United States. The value of apparel exports reached US$292 million in 1995, making it the nation’s second most valuable export next to alumina.”
ECONOMY: TOURISM
“Tourism is Jamaica’s top source of revenue nowadays The tourism industry earns over 50 percent of the country’s total foreign exchange earnings and provides about one-fourth of all jobs in Jamaica. Tourism is vitally important to the health of the Jamaican economy, contributing approximately US$1.23 billion to the economy in 1999. Economic prosperity in the major Western countries and declining international airfares helped make Jamaica a major tourist destination since 1960s. Of these visitors, roughly 65 percent of tourists stay in Jamaican hotels, apartments, guesthouses, and other lodging, while the majority of the remainder visit from cruise ships anchored offshore. Two-thirds of tourists to Jamaica in 1999 were from the United States.”
GEOLOGY
“The island of Jamaica is approximately 205 kilometres long and 73 kilometres wide and is located in the northwestern section of the Caribbean Sea. The island is situated on the northern margin of the Caribbean Plate as it abuts against the North American Plate. The margin between these two plates is the tectonically active east-west trending Cayman Trough. The Cayman Trough, which extends eastwards from the Gulf of Honduras to the east of Hispaniola, lies immediately to the north and separates Jamaica from Cuba. Jamaica is an emergent part of the Nicaraguan Rise, which is a broad, dominantly submerged belt of crustal thickening extending from Honduras to Jamaica. Jamaica, therefore, lies at the junction between two plates; the plate of thickened crust of the Nicaraguan Rise (Caribbean Plate) abbuting against the extending oceanic crust of the Cayman Graben.”
JAMAICAN DRY FOREST 