Four visions, three problems and one common solution
IT ALL has to do with babies. THE 4 VISIONS: The four visions are the aspirations of our national development plan – to become that place where everyone in the world would choose to live, work, raise families, and/or do business.
To make the vision a reality, we need babies – babies who will grow up safe, healthy, and happy and mature into productive lawabiding citizens who can make Jamaica that place of choice. Babies who, as adults, will also have babies who will grow up safe, healthy, and happy, and so on. In other words, the vision depends on maintaining a population level and social environment conducive to keeping Jamaica in existence.
PROBLEM 1: Problem one is the revelation by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) in Parliament recently that with fewer births and high migration, Jamaica’s population is in decline. This fall in numbers has been happening for some decades now, as intended by the 1983 population policy to achieve ‘zero growth’. Yet, a plan for zero growth jeopardised Vision 2030 even before the vision was launched in 2007.
How can we become the place of choice to live, work, etc, if there are fewer people being born to do the living, working, and business? How can we become the place of choice if our citizens keep leaving and desire to leave?
The PIOJ’s recommendation is to apply measures being attempted by developed Western nations that are also facing population decline. These countries in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia are actually in desperate straits. Their birth rates have so precipitously fallen they have either resigned to going into extinction (Japan), are begging, even paying couples to have babies (Singapore), or are paying couples with at least one child (that is, proof of fertility) to live in their town with the hopes of repopulating it (Locana, Italy).
PROMOTE INCREASE?
Even the 1.6 billion-strong economic powerhouse China has awakened to the self-induced demographic crisis caused by its 36-year coercive one-child policy. Without enough babies being born, the future looks bleak. China now encourages having babies.
It must be noted that the call to procreate is made not to random men and women but to men and women in committed relationships with each other. This is because the starting premise for these societies that we are called on to emulate coincides with the human development reality that babies need their father and mother, the man and woman whose genes they carry, and who are to care for them until they reach adulthood.