Stem the flight from farming

Dennis Morrison, Contributor

Of the observations coming out of this newspaper's current series on Jamaica's agriculture, the most telling is what has been said about the obvious state of atrophy in the leadership and organisations that serve the sector.

This has been a decisive factor in the sector's ongoing declining role in Jamaica's economy over many years, a process high-lighted in Colin Bullock's piece, 'Agri development, rural poverty', published last Sunday.

Not only is agriculture's contribution to the nation's production much reduced, but exports of sugar, bananas, and other traditional crops have fallen dramatically. Meanwhile, we have become more heavily dependent on imported food, which now runs close to US$1 billion per year.

None of this is secret, for it has long been evident that the private sector has pulled back not only its finance capital, but its entrepreneurial talent, as the brightest and the best do not see agriculture as a field of choice. The decline is explained in part, too, by the failure of successive political administrations to articulate and implement a coherent and consistent set of policies for the sector. Our political leadership has also failed to provide the inspiration to spur interest since Michael Manley's exhortation for Jamaicans to "eat what we grow and grow what we eat".

The extent to which agriculture has been starved of capital despite the preferential tax concessions provided is revealed in the fact that at its peak, hardly five cents of every dollar of investment in capital goods in the economy went into the sector. More recently, this has dropped to little more than one cent.

Misplaced priorities?

By comparison, investment in transport equipment, of which motor cars represent a disproportionate share, which accounted for less than six and a half cents in 1967, nowadays runs at close to 30 cents. In other words, each year, we spend on motor vehicles more than 15 times what is invested in the agricultural sector. Are we really surprised at the failure to modernise the sector, its low productivity, and declining role in national production?

The sugar industry, the fate of which now hangs substantially on the divestment efforts, is symptomatic of the stagnation in Jamaica's agriculture. In 1965, the industry produced more than half a million tonnes and exported over 400,000 tonnes, having undergone a rejuvenation from 1950 when its production was over 250,000 tonnes. But even as the industry was growing strongly, the imperative for modernisation was already evident.

Debates raged between industry leaders led by Sir Robert Kirkwood, trade unionists, including Michael Manley, government technocrats like G. Arthur Brown, and activist West Indian academics like Havelock Brewster, Clive Thomas and Orlando Patterson, as well as social commentators, including Wilmot 'Mutty' Perkins. Big questions in the famous Sugar Symposium of February 1968 staged by the New World Group were: To mechanise or not? Is sugar production the optimal use of land? Cogent arguments were put on both sides and successive governments wrestled with the questions, but over the decades, we failed to take decisive action, leaving the industry to drift, so that by the late 1970s production was less than half the 1965 level and is today just over a quarter.

Over the period, the leadership of the sugar industry dissipated, with foreign private investors pulling out to be replaced mainly by the State. The organisations which were once stalwarts in mobilising the industry also disintegrated on the private-sector side. Indeed, the organisational infrastructure began to slide, including the Sugar Industry Research Institute. The state entities established when the Government took up ownership stake in the industry have been badly managed, with vast sums from the public purse being sunk into attempts to keep the industry in survival mode, out of fear of the social repercussions, rather than to modernise operations. We could hop along with obsolete factories of 1940s vintage while Jamaica remained a beneficiary of the high support price paid under the European sugar protocol, but these preferential arrangements are fast disappearing.

Resurgence

A similar story could be told of other agricultural industries where Jamaica had experienced resurgence in the 1950s with a combination of activist private-sector leadership, including farmers' associations and state support. Banana and cattle were areas where outstanding advances were made in developing indigenous research capacity that propelled local production, and in the case of bananas, enhanced our competitiveness in overseas markets. The agricultural research centre at Bodles was then the home of ground-breaking research by T.P. Lecky that created new breeds of cows, and by Ren Gonzales in bananas.

Even as traditional export agricultural crops like sugar and bananas lost ground after periods of buoyancy, domestic food crop production continued with few exceptions almost on a subsistence basis. Attempts in the 1970s to boost extension services and raise the productivity of small farmers by introducing modern technology produced some positive results but were not sustained. Domestic food crops also suffered the disadvantage of having to compete with subsidised food imports from the North American and European surplus stocks financed by soft loans.

The rebirth of the sector is going to be a monumental task given the propensity of capital to replicate existing investment patterns that prefer low risk, fast-turnover activities. Can we devise an incentive system that would rebalance the allocation of resources, including human resources towards not just primary agriculture, but to spur the conversion of primary crops to value-added products? The sector will not contribute to Jamaica's long-term development, and poverty in our rural communities will persist without this transformation.

Dennis Morrison is an economist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.

Morrison