Editorial | Putting the horse behind the cart on Bernard Lodge

At a seminar in Kingston 10 days ago, Daryl Vaz, the de facto head of the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, told government planners that a draft spatial plan for Jamaica will be ready by December.

A spatial plan, broadly, is a framework set out by the Government, after rigorous consultations among varying disciplines, for the utilisation of the national space in a way that balances the needs of economic, social and physical development. In other words, it is a way to prevent development from taking place in a hodgepodge manner. It is not too different, if at all, from what they used to call town and country planning.

That a draft spatial plan for the island will be ready in four months suggests that a substantial amount of preliminary work has already taken place. This isn’t something that recently caught the fancy of Mr Vaz, his boss, Prime Minister Andrew Holness, or the technocrats at the super ministry, under which falls almost all of the portfolios that must be engaged in spatial planning.

Yet, even when the document now being crafted is ready, that won’t be the end of the process, as the acting chief technical director at the economic growth ministry, Gillian Guthrie, indicated at the recent ­seminar. The document will be further debated.

QUESTIONABLE PURSUIT

All of this raises questions about the logic of the Government’s apparent relentless pursuit of its most ambitious spatial development project, the notorious Bernard Lodge city, even as it crafts a national spatial strategy. On the face of it, Prime Minister Holness and his Government have gone far ahead of themselves.

There are other facts that compound the ­obvious illogic of placement of cart and horse in this ­matter. The Bernard Lodge city, which is to accommodate more than 17,000 homes, commercial and ­industrial buildings, as well as recreational facilities, will ­requiring culling nearly 7,000 acres from the 29,000-acre Bernard Lodge Estate, of which smaller portions have previously been sequestrated for housing. Government’s National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) describes the lands to be used for the city as being “in texture, from sand and loam to clay loam and are, in general, the most fertile soils in the island and regarded as Class 1 soils”.

Yet, these “most fertile soils in the island” will be placed under concrete, permanently expropriating it from agriculture, exacerbating a process that has seen the 37 per cent of Jamaica that used to be suitable to agriculture slashed to under 20 per cent, largely because of an accelerated excursion of real estate on to farmlands over the last 50 years. It was this problem, as John Allgrove, the doyen of civil engineering in Jamaica, recently reminded us, that caused the Urban Development Corporation, in 1970, to propose the development of the Hellshire Hills “to prevent the invasion of the excellent agricultural lands in southeast St Catherine”.

A National Physical Development Plan, done two years later by the then Town and Planning Department, showed that it wasn’t only the St Catherine plains, the home of Bernard Lodge, that were under threat, but that much of the rest of the island’s best farmlands had already been gobbled up for housing.

Taking more land away from potential agricultural use is happening at a time when Jamaica’s US$900-million food import bill is on the rise and appears to fly in the face of Prime Minister Holness’ declared commitment to food security and Mr Vaz’s acknowledgement of the threats of climate change. One feared consequence of global warming is a decline, in the not-too-far future, of agricultural yields by up to 30 per cent. In other words, maintaining output at current levels, unless there is a major breakthrough in science, will require 30 per cent more, rather than less, land in agriculture.