Ronald Thwaites | We are the best!

Last week, our Government removed General Consumption Tax on imported horses, but declined to do the same on locally produced eggs. Given the mounting cost of feed and electricity and the inability of consumers to pay much more, there is a glut of eggs. Farmers will have to cut back their flocks and, as night follows day, there will soon be a cry of scarcity and the issuance of an import licence to a favourite supporter and, who to tell, a generous election-related kickback. A so it set!

I remember having to carry on bad in Parliament years ago and finally obtaining a list of the entities which had been awarded licences to import chicken backs over the previous year. Fortunes are amassed by well-connected political personages on the back of the protein poverty of ordinary Jamaicans. I ought to have read out the names.

If our priorities were right, there would be no tax on locally grown produce so essential to the health and well-being of the nation’s 650,000 schoolchildren, for whom eggs are both a nutritious and price-effective source of protein to enhance learning .

The eggs which can’t sell now should be purchased by the school-feeding programme, processed, where necessary, and distributed. The schoolers are the captive market upon which domestic agriculture can be rendered stable and contribute more to health improvement and learning uplift.

HEALTHY DIET

In 2013, I begged the then minister of agriculture, the late and much-lamented Roger Clarke, to lead us at the Ministry of Education in developing an affordable, mostly locally grown, healthy diet for school youth, with particular emphasis on the early-childhood cohorts, where eating preferences are developed. He said it would take several years. We tried with some fresh fruits, but the project quailed. There is no consistent production to satisfy this demand: little appetite for the hard work and linkages necessary to grow, process and market our own wealth. It’s much easier to import. But wait, hasn’t that always been our role as colonists: exporters of raw materials and excited importers of finished goods and fads.

So fried chicken, fries and pizza remain the staples for our kids. (The students on PATH get about one-third of what a decent meal costs. I plead for an immediate increase to $500 per day.) Food import licences prevail, farmers despair, and more obesity and non-communicable diseases will abound. Once again, as with national security, we and the leaders who foist themselves on us refuse to identify and deal with root causes and effective spending priorities.

Any political or commercial tendency which puts forward a plan for greater food sufficiency based on linkage with the visitor and diaspora sectors, then the satisfaction of local consumer demand, with the balance of production dedicated to school and institutional nutrition, should attract strong support from all of us. Having neutered JC Hutchinson’s embryonic efforts to this end, ‘just look at us now’.

DRIVING WESTWARDS

As you travel the East-West Highway, check on land use on the southern plain between Kingston and Mandeville. Thousands of acres of once-productive land, where cane was grown profitably for centuries to enrich the British Raj, irrigable or already irrigated, where it has not been prostituted for housing, largely lie fallow or in unrelieved ruination. How can we expect prosperity, or even sufficiency, from such misuse of natural assets?

Weren’t we promised massive food production for export facilitated by improved road and rail access? The country was told that the cane lands were leased to the Chinese. Later when they flopped, Audley told us that there were numerous, well-capitalised takers to invest in modern export and domestic output. What has happened to them? Who is accountable. At least Agro 21 and Spring Plain showed us what could be done before they, too, followed the hearts of palm project into wasteful oblivion.

Beyond Clarendon, as the 18-wheeler trailers, most laden with foreign food we ought to be growing, swish past, notice the mined-out craters, each the open tomb of our dreams, now waiting to claim the wrong-stepping, scrub-seeking cow or goat – never to be restored to production.

Then follow the proposed ‘Silk Road’ south with the shuttered roadside shops and reach Bamboo Holland, where more investment seems to be available for replanting bamboo than for growing food. And let’s not depress ourselves this week by creating word pictures about the once-glorious Frome and the impoverishment of Westmoreland.

We are the architects of our own misfortune.

We splurge fortunes on high-rise buildings, squatting on earthquake fault lines, while scorning or debasing the inestimable value of the soil which is our alpha and omega.

BUNTING AND WEHBY

Both these senators expressed important agreement last week that public corporations which fail to submit timely accounts ought not to continue to be governed by the same directors who permitted this delict. Taxpayers need to rebel against agencies like JUTC, National Works Agencies and OPDEM, which are trustees of billions of public dollars for which they offer no accountability in time to prevent corruption and waste. And there are hundreds more ministries, agencies and departments in chronic arrears.

It is the responsibility of well-paid ministers and permanent secretaries to guarantee prudent spending of tax money – which is extracted from many who can’t afford food and other necessities.

This is politics time again. Voters should inform themselves around the issue of the honest, efficient and accountable use of money by any political administration. My proposal for the delinquent public bodies is to stop the flow of funds to any agency which so disrespects their employers as to fail to present accounts for more than a year. Of course, that was dismissed summarily by Parliament in 2010. At least Peter and Don, both well-regarded businessmen, have begun to show concern about the slackness. Even so, I expect nothing will come of it.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at the UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.