A Jamaican community advocacy group, the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (Jabbem), is launching five court cases this month to challenge the privatisation of beaches across the island, including Mammee Bay, the Blue Lagoon, and Flankers beach in Montego Bay. At the heart of the dispute is the 1956 Beach Control Act — a law inherited from British colonial rule that grants the state ownership of Jamaica's foreshore and seabed, effectively allowing the government to licence beaches to private hotel developers and restrict public access. Campaigners argue the law underpins a "plantation tourism" model that funnels profits to foreign investors and a domestic elite while cutting off ordinary Jamaicans — including fishers, vendors, and coastal communities — from shorelines they depend on for food, income, and cultural life. The government has proposed a new beach access and management policy and points to tourism's role in employing over 110,000 people, but activists reject the policy's "qualified rights" framework as insufficient, demanding free and permanent public access to the coast.