EDITORIAL - Good plan for Sydney Pagon

There is a penchant in Jamaica for finding problems to every solution - or most every. The Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA) is particularly good at it.

Recently, the president of the JTA, Nadine Molloy Young, raised concerns, or, more correctly perhaps, complained about what she perceived to be a plan by the education ministry to divest, sell or transfer the Sydney Pagon Agricultural School in St Elizabeth to the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI).

The claim was that a deal was being cut in secret that others in the teachers' union declared to be an "assault" on the JTA, against which teachers had to be mobilised to resist.

This newspaper has had its fair share of complaints against the Golding administration for being less than transparent in too many of its dealings, the basis for the planned conversion from oil to liquefied natural gas as the country's primary energy source being among them.

However, establishing ramparts and creating battle lines is hardly, if ever, the best first move towards solving a problem. Constructive dialogue usually is.

In the dark?

And in this case, we are surprised that the JTA is claiming ignorance of plans for Sydney Pagon (formerly Elim Agricultural School) and is only now raising its concerns.

Second, we believe that the broad proposals for Sydney Pagon are worthy of support by the JTA.

With regard to the first issue, last August, responding to a correspondent's complaint about the state of agricultural education in Jamaica, Cecil Thoms, the director of communications in the agriculture ministry, addressed plans for Sydney Pagon in a letter to this newspaper.

"... We are working to upgrade the Sydney Pagon Agricultural School to a school for food and agriculture, with affiliation to the University of the West Indies," he said. That, apparently, missed the JTA.

There are good reasons to support this plan. We start with an issue that has been the focus of this newspaper and given credence by a recent event - the matter of food security in the face of spiralling food prices.

The world has had its second 'food-price shock' in three years, suggesting that the spike of 2007-2008 was not a one-off event. Indeed, the Food and Agriculture Organisation's food-price index is now at its highest since it began two decades ago. The World Bank estimates that more than 40 million people have already been pushed into poverty by the rising prices and that the number of hungry people will cross the one-billion mark by year end.

Shortage of high-level skills

Jamaica spends around US$900 million a year importing food, of which, our experts say, up to a quarter could be substituted by domestic production. Even it was only 10 per cent, that would translate to nearly J$8 billion being available to domestic investment and consumption, and job creation, including agro-processing.

One problem, though, is the shortage of high-level agricultural skills in Jamaica, which this newspaper aggressively highlighted in these columns two years ago. Hardly any Jamaicans graduated from UWI's Faculty of Agriculture in Trinidad.

To UWI's credit, Mona has since developed a graduate programme in tropical horticulture, and agricultural entrepreneurship at the postgraduate level. Mona has also stepped up its research in agriculture.

But applied research is done where things actually happen - in the field. There is no better place at which to start than St Elizabeth, Jamaica's breadbasket.

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