Neglect besets St Thomas

THE EDITOR, Sir:

An open letter to Prime Minister Bruce Golding.

I would like to thank you, Prime Minister, for your intervention in the procurement problem with the Violet Thompson Basic School in Airy Castle, although I still await a response to my letter of March 21. The Constituency Development Fund Programme which you have implemented has also proven to be a useful tool in addressing the need for some small projects and programmes, especially in the areas of education, infrastructure, social housing, culture, youth, sports and agriculture, in St Thomas Eastern.

However, there are major concerns. Prime Minister, after careful nurturing, up to 2007, Eastern Banana had become the leading export banana entity and, despite many challenges, it provided steady, diversified, direct employment for some 460 persons; and the industry indirectly provided income for hundreds more, in areas such as trucking, catering, shopkeeping, and peasant farming, among others.

After having received a government loan of US$4 million in 2007 - which was later written off - a year later, Eastern Banana was allowed to close its operations. A further tragedy is that the best lands were divested to large farmers, while the former workers, to date, have not received so much as a square of land, notwithstanding the fact that the only remaining lands are in the least-fertile sections of the estate. So, today, four years later, Eastern Banana is dead and 460 workers have been sent home, jobless and landless.

Sugar workforce reduced

In the area of sugar, while I must commend the continued efforts of the management and workers of the Golden Grove Sugar Company, (formerly Duckenfield Sugar), the number of persons working at the factory has been reduced considerably since 2007. I feel certain that you remain mindful that significant sums were spent on refurbishing the factory buildings and purchasing equipment and, in the end, everything was divested for only US$500,000. Today, the workers and former workers in sugar are still lamenting the non-receipt of the European Union grant funding which some should have received under the Sugar Transformation Programme of the Ministry of Agriculture.

The Moy Hall Coffee Factory was regarded as a cooperative that represented best practices and which supported thousands of persons directly and indirectly. That is now dead, having received no government support in recent times.

In Bath, we had worked assiduously to develop a mini-stadium, with financing slated to come from the private sector. Today, the mini-stadium is incomplete, and there is no sign of continuing government engagement with those investors.

Citizens and visitors alike are also asking what has happened to the $150m for the refurbishing and expansion of the Bath Fountain Hotel.

Thankfully, the planning, design, funding and the contract award for the Bath Police Station, which had been done pre-2007, was allowed to proceed to completion two years or so ago.

Routine maintenance

Inexplicably though, a routine maintenance programme for the National Works Agency-managed roads, which had been put in place before your administration, with funding by the Inter-American Development Bank, has now ground to a halt. Our lives depend on this programme. Instead, today there is an inventory of broken and failed bridges, especially the Pear Tree River Bridge; unsafe and sometimes impassable roadways, inclusive of our main road from Leith Hall to Quaw Hill; and flooded thoroughfares.

I must confess that there were some things that were left unattended by the previous administration. I am still disappointed that neither the previous nor present Government has been able to reutilise the old Goodyear factory, which has such tremendous potential as space for a call centre or other ICT activity.

We are also deeply concerned about the closure of our HEART/NTA-supported community hospitality training programme in the parish. This has deprived many young people of the opportunity for self-actualisation.

FENTON FERGUSON, MP (Dr)

MP, St Thomas Eastern