Editorial | Head east with care

Daryl Vaz may be hyperbolic with his claim that the highway project on Jamaica’s southeast, for which the Government signed agreements last week, “is, by far, the best thing to happen to the eastern end of the island in decades”. But we get the point.

The parish of St Thomas, often described as Jamaica’s most underdeveloped and whose residents often complain of neglect, will potentially be the biggest beneficiary.

But Portland, further along the coast, heading east, should also reap substantial value.  
Development, however, isn’t usually without cost. In that regard, we hope Prime Minister Andrew Holness will be deliberate and careful to avoid the pitfalls of previous administrations, as well as this one, such as his cavalier plan for a new city at Bernard Lodge, on the alluvial plains of St Catherine, which the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) has described as “the most fertile soil in the island”.

International development literature is replete with testimony of the positive effect of transportation infrastructure on the advancement of communities and countries. Roads, for instance, may open new areas to residences and commercial/industrial enterprises.

Better roads often mean greater access to transportation at lower costs. People, therefore, can work farther from where they live while the movement of goods also becomes cheaper. The net effect, usually, is greater efficiency in the economy.

Indeed, Jamaica has the evidence of the explosive take-off of hotel construction on the island’s north coast during the 1990s into the 2000s, following the rebuilding of the North Coast Highway and associated infrastructure, as well as expansion of the island’s southwest and south-central regions with the opening of the east-west segment of Highway 2000. The North-South Highway, linking Kingston, the capital, and commercial centre on the south coast, with the tourism hub on the north shore, also suggests significant potential for enhancing economic growth and development. There are similar fortunes to be had from the Ferris to Mackfield roadworks.
 

UPGRADING COST

As Mr Vaz, who has day-to-day ministerial responsibility for the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, suggests, the administration expects that upgrading 110 kilometres of roadway – from Harbour View in St Andrew through to St Thomas, to Port Antonio, Portland – will provide an economic fillip to the southeast. This project will cost US$195 million.

“Once we put down the 14-kilometre dual carriageway, which will take us close to Morant Bay from Harbour View, we want to follow immediately behind that with housing,” Prime Minister Holness said after signing contracts with the Chinese firm, China Harbour Engineering Company. “We are not just putting down roads, we are putting down the necessary infrastructure for water and telecommunications and, where possible, sewerage.” 

We welcome this initiative, but with an important proviso. The soils of St Thomas and Portland may not be of the ‘Class 1’ category NEPA assigned to Bernard Lodge. Both parishes, though, have extremely good farmlands, on which Jamaicans have, for centuries, grown sugar cane, bananas, coconut and other cash crops. Much of those lands are now fallow and overgrown, especially with the decline of the sugar industry.

That, however, doesn’t mean that they should be handed over wholesale to real estate and placed under concrete, as Mr Holness intends for several thousand acres  at Bernard Lodge, where his proposed city will accommodate 17,000 homes, plus commercial and industrial facilities.

Mr Vaz and the PM have recently lamented the reality of climate change, of which one potential consequence, in the not-far term, is a 30 per cent fall in agricultural yields.

One takeaway from this statistic is that barring innovations and a big breakthrough from science, it will, on average, require 30 per cent more land to achieve the same agricultural output. In the circumstance, food prices, including for Jamaica, which has an annual food-import bill of US$900 million, will rise. We shouldn’t, therefore, be foreclosing our best lands to agriculture.

So, hopefully, the houses that are to follow the dual carriageway will be on marginal real estate. There are other environmental issues, too, related to road and transportation expansion, of which we expect Mr Holness’ advisers to be aware and to which we expect the PM to pay key attention, especially in a delicate biodiverse environment such as Portland.