Sugar, Long Pond and Bernard Lodge

‘We must remember that some of these students have emotional and social challenges, learning challenges, varied learning styles, and cognitive challenges. Teaching and learning are the responsibilities of both teacher and student and should not be left to the teacher alone’.

AN IMPORTANT fact of the Government’s reported agreement to lease 3,600 acres of land at Long Pond, Trelawny, to the AllIsland Jamaica Cane Farmers Association (AIJCA) is that it isn’t for real estate development. Unlike at Bernard Lodge, St Catherine, no city is planned there. That is a positive development for which Jamaicans ought to be thankful.

Second, the AIJCA doesn’t plan to use the land to grow sugar cane, which suggests the association’s grudgingly slow acceptance – unless there is a miraculous, or highly creative cure to its ailment – of the terminal state of Jamaica’s sugar industry. In the event, the situation calls for an accounting by the Holness administration of state of the sector, what it perceives to be its interests threin, in the future. For, while we appreciate, and applaud, the apparent signal of the Long Pond deal, there is no certitude that it will be sustained and that taxpayers won’t be called upon again to administer another round of financial CPR.

Long Pond was among five state-owned sugar factories and estates divested by the Government in 2009, in its second attempt in less than a decade and a half, to disengage from the industry in which it was losing nearly J$5 billion a year and had over J$30 billion of debt. Four of those factories are closed. One of three that were acquired by the Chinese company COMPLANT is merely limping along, and many thousands of acres of land is underutilised.

In the case of Long Pond, and the associated Hampden, for which the Hussey family-controlled Everglades Farms paid J$133 million for the factories, the deal included a separate 50-year lease of more than 17,500 acres of land. But despite a reported US$3 billion injection in the business, it was soon apparent that the factory was in trouble.

The factory has been idle for three seasons, having been operated for one crop by the Government. The Administration, however, subsidises the cost of transportation, to other factories, of sugar cane local farmers used to deliver to Long Pond.

Apparently, under the arrangement, the AICJA will lease from the Government about a fifth of the land that initially went to Everglades, which it will sublet to regional farmers, who must undertake to grow, on at least 70 per cent of their acreages, crops recommended by the Government’s Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA). Central-market arrangements will, seemingly, be part of the mix although how this will work remains opaque.

What is obvious, and pellucid, is that Jamaica has had an extremely hard time making a profitable go at sugar for more than a half century and that this has been exacerbated for the last decade as the country lost its preferential markets in Europe. With low global prices for the commodity, we have been unable to compete with the industry’s big players.

It seems, from our vantage point, specious to place the blame for this on the organisation, the supposed misunderstandings, presumed incompetence, and underinvestment of the industry’s new players, given the broad business/industrial track record of a company like the Seprod Group, which lost J$5 billion, before giving up the ghost of its Dukenfield, St Thomas, factory. Even the domestic industry’s most efficient operators, the private Worthy Park Estate, and Appleton Estate, which is owned by the global drinks company, Campari, struggle for profitability.

NEW MODEL PREHAPS?

Perhaps the AIJCA’s plan for Long Pond offers one model for dealing with former sugar lands. Seprod’s idea for the commercial cultivation of cassava at Dukenfield may be another. All of which represents a potential break from the State’s historic, and sociological, tie to the sugar industry, which is treated as an avenue for social welfare when it would probably be cheaper to provide direct financial transfers to all its employees than paying subsidies, as it used to do, to shore up the sector.

We don’t believe that governments, ordinarily, should be in the business of picking economic winners, which, too often, misallocates resources and creates distortions in markets. We, nonetheless, believe in the principle of countries ensuring food security, or being in a position to grow, insofar as possible, a healthy portion of what they consume. That is why we are happy that there is no sign, as yet, of policymakers wanting to put the Long Pond lands under concrete. We hope they never will.

The opinions on this page, except for The Editorial, do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Gleaner.