Groaning over growth
THERE IS much current agitation over the economy’s failure to grow. But, except recently by Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) Governor Richard Byles, not much identification of its source, the need for long-term planning and implementation.
Where there has been some, namely in the financial sector (with some International Monetary Fund input) and in Kingston port facilities, we rejoice over the beneficial outcomes and potential prospects.
Tourism is a special case, the result of decades of private-sector initiative with State cooperation over several political administrations. Politicians, almost by definition, have short vision. Yet, those examples show what individual parties together can accomplish.
In many areas, however, the absence of serious, long-range plan execution is striking – manufacturing, agriculture, water delivery, roads and public transport, garbage management, MSMEs, and, most crucially, violence and murder, education and training. People’s National Party (PNP) President Dr Peter Phillips’ placing of education as the top priority of his party gives hope in that regard, depending on what they come up with. They have a good guide in R.G. Thwaites.
But signs of action in the other sectors are glaringly absent. Agriculture is especially important. This is, in large part, because it is able to provide the needed base to the agro-industry that could make use of the unique qualities of Jamaica’s range of fruits and other products. Agriculture is the base, recommended by Nobel Prize winner W. Arthur Lewis, one from which, as he recognised, many now-industrialised countries took off from in the 19th century.
SUGAR CANE LANDS GOING TO WASTE
Consider sugar cane, which occupies some of the country’s best flatlands, some of which should be in other crops. The situation on Frome Estate is truly tragic. On Shrewsbury farm, for instance, one of the estate’s 12 subdivisions, one of the best watered of all and formerly among its most productive. (I knew this estate intimately from my three years living there, drove, and knew every cane field road.)
Most of it is thrown up and left to the cows and goats of neighbouring villagers to roam and eat at will. The same is true of at least three other farms, with hundreds of acres going to waste. The Chinese, better in factory perhaps than in field, don’t appear to have the know-how for this task.
Monymusk has entirely given up. Much of this land, as the sugar cooperatives knew from the 1970s and began to act on, should be put into cassava and other crops. Where in all of this have successive governments taken decisive action? Only, it seems, at fertile Bernard Lodge (where the co-ops were breaking even until Seaga shut them down in 1981) with the Government’s ‘new-city’ plan, probably driven by the partisan motive of countering the PNP’s hold on Portmore!
Absurd and outrageous though this plan is, it does illustrate the kind of initiative by the State that this country needs – only this time to put the economy on to a growth path, not worsen its stagnation.
The solution does not lie in proclaiming that the private sector is the engine of growth. The State has resources and growth engines – tax-incentive engine, bank-control engine, security-control engine, foreign trade, etc – that can and must be brought to bear on specific situations.
We can see Trump doing it in North America, Tusk and others in the European Union, Johnson floundering in the United Kingdom. National planning and oversight of the execution of the plans is the job of the managers of the State – in Jamaica’s case, the two political parties ruling this country, in consultation with all sectors. This Jamaica Labour Party Government needs to get going. The PNP needs to formulate its policies, too; and there, Peter Phillips’ record is very good.