Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Soaring 480 miles south of Florida, across the Caribbean Sea, to the Caribbean’s third largest island, and landing on a landmass no larger than the state of Connecticut, most people expect to find themselves surrounded by no less than scenic beauty. But the words “scenic beauty” hardly describe Jamaica’s tropical paradise. Most of the plant life that now showers the island, was brought from other places around the world. Farms of bananas, coffee, tobacco, sugarcane, coconut, allspice, bamboo, ackee, nutmeg, breadfruit, and tamarind scatter across the nation. The countryside is blanketed in a growth of poinsettia, hibiscus, poinciana, oleander, and bougainvillea. Jamaican’s have been known to make the one of the worlds’ finest coffee, “Jamaican coffee.” They were also well known for their bananas. Jamaica was the first commercial producer of bananas and sent them long distances easily because of shipping and refrigeration. The banana production suffered greatly in the 1940s