Editorial | Where are we on Vision 2030?

Sixtieth anniversaries, so-called diamond jubilees, such as Jamaica will mark in August as an independent country, are among the symbolic milestones at which people tend to reflect on achievements, and/or engage in spectacular celebrations.

Surprisingly, the Holness administration hasn’t declared a large, overarching theme for this year’s independence anniversary. Neither has the Government, nor anyone else for that matter, engaged in a sober assessment, shorn of narrow political partisanship, of what Jamaica has done with its six decades of independence – and if we might have done more.

On the first point, of doing something spectacular, we wouldn’t be surprised if the administration has something planned – like, perhaps, naming one, or two, new national heroes, whose appointments were likely to capture the popular imagination.

With respect to the broader issue of a national conversation on Jamaica’s performance as a country, instead of a discourse in abstractions, of greater practical value at this time would be a review of specific, measurable targets the country set for itself and how we have performed against them.

In 2009, the Government launched Vision 2030, a 21-year development plan, to make “Jamaica the place of choice to live, work, raise families and do business”. Work on Vision 2030 preceded the administration that launched it. Commitment to it has transcended political administrations. It is a national policy that enjoys consensus.

THE AIM

“Vision 2030 Jamaica is geared towards engaging all Jamaicans and development partners in the process to achieve and benefit from sustainable and inclusive development,” the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), the agency that coordinated its development and is responsible for monitoring its implementation, says of the project.

“The achievement of the four goals and 15 national outcomes will result in a vibrant and internationally competitive economy; a secure and cohesive society; a healthy natural environment; a high level of human capital development; and greater opportunities for social and economic mobility and prosperity.”

Part of the context within which Jamaica’s 2030 Vision was framed is the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, aimed at lifting the world’s population out of poverty and delivering more than the basics of life in a sustainable global environment.

This year, 2022, is the 13th since its launch. There are only eight years until, assuming Vision 2030’s goals are met, Jamaicans should be able to declare our country, with a high degree of confidence, as the preferred place to live, work, raise families and do business.

At the time of the document’s launch, annual economic growth had, for more than three decades, averaged less than one per cent. The vision for 2030 was that Jamaica would have a stable, growth-oriented macro environment in which “each person has the opportunity, capability and support needed to enjoy a sustainable and acceptable quality of life”.

For instance, in an economy where labour productivity has declined by more than one per cent a year for 40 years, and that of manufacturing workers dropped by eight per cent in 2007, Vision 2030 envisioned that people with manufacturing jobs would be recording per capita increases in output of nearly four per cent by 2015. Further, manufacturing would double its value as a proportion of all exports, to 14 per cent, by 2030.

VISION FOR AGRICULTURE

In agriculture, non-traditional exports should have already surpassed 11 per cent of all exports, heading to at least 19 per cent by 2030. The vision plan said of agriculture: “The sector will experience a sustained, research-oriented, technological, market-driven and private sector-led revolution which revitalises rural communities, creates strong linkages with other sectors and emphatically repositions the sector in the national economy.”

That prognosis for the farm sector is especially relevant at this time, in the face of food inflation unleashed by the COVID-19 supply chain disruption, which has been greatly exacerbated by the war between Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, as recent reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) have shown, many Jamaicans, like millions of people around the world, face the spectre of food insecurity.

Against that backdrop, the Vision 2030 goals are no doubt under constant review by policymakers and bureaucrats. But while they are periodically referred to by officials, Vision 2030 is a catchphrase, rather than the subject of a sustained conversation with the rest of us. Jamaica’s Diamond Jubilee is as good an occasion to start that discussion, to determine where we are with the declared goals, and what needs to be recalibrated or fully reset.

But this should not be a one-off dialogue. The circumstances insist on a continuous discourse so that all Jamaicans can follow the trajectory of the project and determine the progress of the aims, to which the vast majority, if not all of us, subscribe.