EDITORIAL - Time for the JAS to dump itself

At the end of this month, and going into the first two days of August, the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS) will host its annual agricultural show at Denbigh, Clarendon.

We wonder whether they should bother. For like its organisers, the Denbigh Agricultural Show has, for several years now, been of little relevance. Except, perhaps, as a large, incoherent haberdashery of mostly imported goods, with a smattering of livestock exhibits and the output of a few hardy farmers.

In essence, the Denbigh show is a precise metaphor for the JAS's leadership - fumbling, incoherent and absent of a vision for a modern agricultural sector.

This failure is not because those at the helm of the JAS are ignorant and do not genuinely have the interest of agriculture at heart. Rather, the JAS, like many old organisations - it is 115 years old - suffers from two fundamental problems.

The first is that the organisation has come to believe in the inevitability of itself; its existence is an end in itself, rather than for a larger purpose. So, it shuns rigorous self-evaluation and resists fundamental reform and the need to adapt to the times.

Serious assumptions

The occasional noises from these organisations, therefore, tend to be more of a reflexive and haphazard jogging of the memory, rather than the outcome of serious assumptions and/or deep thought.

But perhaps more fundamental to such organisations, which is clearly apparent in the JAS, is their expropriation by leadership. This problem, though, is even worse in the JAS: the essential appropriation of its leadership by the People's National Party.

In other words, the leadership has largely become a stepping stone to political office and the JAS a vehicle for corralling votes on behalf of the party, rather than an organisation for articulating the interest of farmers and of agriculture.

The upshot is that those in the JAS's leadership tend to have a view of agriculture that is largely unadorned by the prospects of modernity and the possibilities for the farm sector's place in a 21st-century economy. Hence, the JAS's Denbigh Show may be better viewed through, if you can find one, William Lincoln's zoopraxiscope, with background music via Edison's phonograph.

Radical remake

The JAS, though, can avoid total atrophy and find new relevance, although, admittedly, the effort will not be easy. The current leadership must admit the importunity of the organisation as it now exists and, with outside help, undergo a radical remake.

The easier route would be for the JAS members to transcend nostalgia, wind up the organisation and allow the creation of a new, relevant and modern group to represent farmers' and agriculture's interests.

Indeed, we suggest to the JAS leadership that this year's Denbigh show, if it is persisted with, should be a platform for announcing which of our proposed options will be followed, preferably the second.

Of course, while the JAS may be the largest and most significant of the farm sector organisations to have lost its way, it is not the only one. Almost all the others are in a bad way, including, as we have said before, the All-island Jamaica Cane Farmers Association. So, ditto our recommendations.

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