Both sugar and bananas have lost preferential access to their traditional European Union (EU) markets in the age of liberalisation of the global economy. In addition, with the frequency of hurricane damage increasing in recent years, it was decided to abandon the exports of bananas completely. The bauxite/ alumina industry all but shut down in 2008, when international demand plummeted in the global crisis that was precipitated by the financial crisis of that year. The current owners of the mines and processing facilities have demanded access to cheaper energy as the price for restarting the industry. This is one of the major drivers for the urgent transformation of the energy supply that has become a high priority for the Jamaican government. Forests were cleared, and the habitats they supported were destroyed, to establish the sugar industry in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.