Jamaica's Development? - 'Caught short!'

[Karl]

'Caught short!'
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, June 17, 2007


One major problem with the media is that whenever we make fools of ourselves we find it easy to blame everyone else.


In the hysterical rush to find a scapegoat for the Woolmer 'embarrassment', a great many have seized on Mark Shields, the Scotland Yard detective who was brought here to strengthen the Jamaica Constabulary's pathetically weak crime investigation abilities.

In the rush to pillory Shields, a few important facts appear to have been forgotten.

One is that Deputy Commissioner Shields is not the commissioner of police and that he must have been speaking with the authority of the commissioner.

Two is that Mr Shields is not a pathologist.

A third and perhaps even more important fact is that it was the press/media, local and foreign who were responsible for most of the noise confusion and whatever embarrassment surrounded the case. Every rumour, every piece of speculation no matter how trivial or bizarre, got its moment in some medium.

Before Woolmer's body was cold, the international press and some people from the Indian subcontinent were convinced that not only must there have been foul play but that someone from India or Pakistan, some gambling interest, was involved.

This was being said before there was any autopsy and before the police had issued any statement. The media frenzy from there on was uncontrollable.

There was huge embarrassment that Woolmer had died in dramatic circumstances: his team, highly fancied, had just been ejected from the World Cup. This totally unexpected event was the fuel for almost all of what followed.

The argument was simple: Pakistan, one of the tiger sharks of world cricket could not have lost fairly to Ireland, one of the so-called minnows. The match must have been fixed.

From that followed all kind of lunacies. Woolmer had stumbled on the 'fix' and was going to write a book exposing the fixers. His laptop and manuscript had disappeared; Woolmer had had a 'blazing row' with a bookmaker on the day; Woolmer was murdered by touring Pakistani cricket fanatics, angered and shamed by the loss; Woolmer had been killed by the Pakistani captain who it was said, had been linked to shady characters.
And so it went on. I can't go into all the lunacy but there is a good summary of it in the Guardian by Patrick Barham -"Woolmergate: the false murder theories exploded" http://www.guardian.co.uk/
crime/article/0,,2101594,00.html) which is a superb, succinct summation of the media frenzy. It includes one particularly zany fact of which I was unaware. The Sun newspaper, in London, part of the Murdoch empire, asked this headline question: "Al-Qaeda link to Woolmer murder"?

Well, why not? If Alberto Gonzales, the US Attorney General, had heard of this possibility someone would certainly have been arrested.

Much of the media operate on the principle that in any unexplained event, those responsible for the investigation must be holding something back if they aren't giving press conferences on the hour.

Most policemen are not accustomed to this sort of pressure.
One of the few who had the courage to tell the press where to get off was Charles Moose, the police chief of Montgomery County, Maryland, during the Mohammed/Malvo sniper panic five years ago.

But it can't be easy, especially in something like the Woolmer affair when one is being pestered by hundreds of polyglot sports reporters who mostly don't understand how the police work.

Our Jamaican problem is that we are so sensitive to any possibility of bad publicity that we blow everything out of proportion - making it inevitable that there will be bad publicity.

Cont'd

Copyright ©2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@yahoo.com

[Karl]

Caught short!

cont

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'Caught short!'
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, June 17, 2007











Inferiority and globalisation
Among our abiding myths is that small farmers are inefficient and wasteful. Agro-industry is the answer, miles and miles of monocrop destined for machine processing and export.

Shortly after I returned to Jamaica in 1971 from my five-year exile in England, I chanced upon a small book printed by the Agricultural Extension department of Alcan and written by Ted Tatham, then head of that department.

In this pamphlet, Tatham revealed that on Alcan's mined-out land, which was good for hardly anything but grass, small dairy farmers to whom the land was leased were out-producing Alcan's pedigreed, pampered cows, surrounded by every mod con and housed better than most Jamaican farmers.

If I remember correctly, when they grew corn and gungo peas, they also out-produced the company's demonstration plots.

I took the little blue book to Michael Manley who read it and called Tatham that night. That was the genesis of Operation Land Lease. Land Lease was defeated by Jamaican tradition, by big farmers who thought that smallholdings were nonsense; by politicians who wanted a piece of the action and by some of the farmers themselves who had entered the programme without the requisite skills or attitudes.

One powerful factor, of course, was anti-communism. Leasing land to small farmers was a communist trick.

But the programme did work and produced increasing volumes of foods for domestic consumption, giving rise to another great project, the Agricultural Marketing Corporation - shut down by the JLP in 1980 because it endangered the margins of supermarkets.

We were, instead going to grow spring vegetables, for the tables of wealthy Americans. I won't go into that debacle, except to say that a key mistake all the heavy metal developers make, in farming, tourism and everything else, is to believe that large enterprises producing solely for export is the way to wealth everlasting. They talk about economies of scale, forgetting that there have been farms in the US as big as Jamaica.

We shall soon see the real differences between Jamaican hotels and the new, foreign mass production people factories. Like the in-bond shops and cruise shipping they return nothing to Jamaica except a few subsistence level jobs, they buy everything from abroad and leave behind only the wastes of their operation, garbage and the sewage generated for Jamaica to clean up.

The Jamaican-owned hotels, buying significant supplies here and employing people at living wages probably pump, bed for bed, five times as much into the Jamaican economy as do these beached cruise-liners on concrete beaches pumping sewage into wetlands and the sea.

While we are busy privatising water supplies, guaranteeing super profits for those lucky enough to be chosen, right next door to these water supplies are thousands of squatters, polluting the ground water - just like the hotels - and frightening the hoi polloi.

While we are privatising public beaches, nearly one half of the children in secondary schools are graduating illiterate and unfit for any job outside the cane field. And not too many of those either.

There are people who boast about the boost to the GDP provided by foreign investment in bauxite in the 1960s, blind to the fact that those investments were basically loans which we are repaying twice and thrice over, in communities atomised and scattered, in families disrupted and criminalised, in homeless children, barrel children, in toxic aluminum dusts, in devastated landscapes and contaminated water supplies and in money exported by the ton to bank accounts all over the 'civilised' world.

Economists speak of 'externalities', meaning costs intrinsic to an operation but paid for, not by the operators, but by someone else.

The investment costs for power supplies, water supplies, sewerage, devastated wetlands, desertified farmland, in a countryside made ugly and unproductive because its soil has been exported, those costs are all externalities to the proud rich investors in bauxite.

Foreign investment here is cost-free, risk-free and all the benefits are exported.

Many of our foreign investors are here because they can get away with behaviour here that would land them in jail in their own countries.

Spanish municipalities are busy blowing up, with dynamite, brand new hotels like the ones being built here, because these hotels are affronts to humanity, to aesthetic, spiritual, and recreational values. They disfigure the landscape and remove tranquility and peace from the human experience.

When our children discover them for what they are they will probably blow them up too, if sea-level rise from global warming has not already done them in.

Old time reporters used to advise the younger ones to have a pee whenever you could, because you never knew when the next opportunity would present itself.

In London in the 1960s, I was one night astonished by a hoarse shout of "Caught Short!" and the sight of a young woman, squatting on the edge of the underground railway platform aiming a stream onto the railway tracks. I was told that she would not be prosecuted, because under some ancient law, it was OK to relieve oneself in public if you warn others by yelling "Caught Short" first.

We keep getting caught short, finding that our Government has built houses in floodplains, on unstable soil or in nature reserves.

We are chronically unprepared for floods, although floods are our most predictable, regular and frequent natural catastrophes.

We spend millions on the World Cup, but we can't find the time or money to provide playing fields or swimming pools for our children. And then we expect that the Jamaicans will, as usual, come out on top and we curse them when they don't.

But these errors are perhaps not the most serious mistakes we make.

Last week, because of a previous appointment, I had to miss the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) meeting with senior journalists and others, to discuss the next stage in Jamaica's planning. The PIOJ has designed a new planning matrix, which, over 25 years will co-ordinate strategies and projects so that Jamaica will grow by seven per cent per annum and become a developed (upper income) country by 2030.

Dr Wesley Hughes said Jamaica had grown by seven per cent per annum in the 1960s, which proved we can do it again. What he didn't say was that we had done it before, in the late 1950s when his Planning Institute was founded as the Central Planning Unit by Norman Manley. And the growth of the 1960s was built on the foundation laid in the 1950s, in farming, small manufacture - garments, shoes, furniture - and tourism.

The growth of GDP in the 1960s also owed much to bauxite investment but, at the end of the period, (according to Carl Stone, not me) the people were on the brink of revolt.

The point is that GDP growth itself is meaningless because it measures the wrong things. And attaining the status of a developed country means nothing if only certain sectors of the country are developed. Dr Hughes recognises that: "We cannot have sustainability if social groups are excluded however small the minority".

In the United States a few days ago a woman died, vomiting blood on the floor of the emergency room at a hospital unfortunately named for Martin Luther King in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is the largest city in California, with a state economy bigger than that of France. Yet, this poor woman died from a perforated bowel unattended in a hospital.

The city's emergency services - 911, refused to send an ambulance to take her to another hospital where she would probably have been treated, because she was already at a hospital.

As Michael Moore is contending in a new documentary, poor people die in the United States because they are poor while in Cuba, with a GDP a fraction of California's, such things don't happen.

In fact, Cuba's official GDP is lower than Jamaica's but, it is Jamaica, which is accepting medical, educational, and technical assistance from Cuba.

The difference between our situation and Cuba's is that their development process is not predatory, not extractive. Their GDP is now growing at nine per cent per annum, but their human satisfaction index, if such a measure were calculated, would be far higher. There are probably more murders in our secondary school population than among Cuba's 11.4 million people.
When I first went to Cuba, in 1960, a year after the triumph of the revolution, Jamaica's development was ahead of Cuba's. We were more self-sufficient in everything except sugar and prostitution.

Today the position is reversed, except that we now import sugar from Cuba and Brazil, bananas from Costa Rica and prostitutes from everywhere.

I do not believe that Cuba is perfect any more than any Cuban - including Fidel Castro - believes he lives in a perfect society. Their system may not suit us, but it suits them because they developed it. Our system cannot suit anybody except the people who export money from Jamaica and the people who receive it.

What I call our heavy-metal development is not sustainable because it is not development for people, but development of structures and balance sheets. We will again and again and always, be 'caught short'. In Alcoholics Anonymous they say that doing the same thing over and over expecting different results every time is a sign of madness.
We may need a 12-step programme more than we need a development plan.

Copyright ©2007 John Maxwell
jankunnu@yahoo.com

[Mosiah]

Always informative and entertaining!

[Rockman]

John really is the quintessence of an investigative journalist.
Another peculiar thing, one would've thought the commissioner and others would come to the defense of Shields, as they always do with other police officers.
Regarding salary, how many officers are contracted for a few years? Shields isn't a normal police.
Thanks Maxwell!


Blessed

[MdmeX]

To the best of my ability, the Agricultural Marketing Corporation was in existence before Manley took power. I specifically remember the one in Port Antonio near the Railroad Corporation.

[Willi]

No, its a mid-70s thing.

HQ and distrib centre was on Spanish Town road, near 3 miles...in front of Seaview Gardens. Dangerous area that.

[Willi]

It was not the success that Maxwell paints it to be.

[Mosiah]

Did he say it was a success? Let me read it again.

[Willi]

He said this:

But the programme did work and produced increasing volumes of foods for domestic consumption, giving rise to another great project, the Agricultural Marketing Corporation - shut down by the JLP in 1980 because it endangered the margins of supermarkets.

We were, instead going to grow spring vegetables, for the tables of wealthy Americans. I won't go into that debacle, except to say that a key mistake all the heavy metal developers make, in farming, tourism and everything else, is to believe that large enterprises producing solely for export is the way to wealth everlasting. They talk about economies of scale, forgetting that there have been farms in the US as big as Jamaica.

[Mosiah]

Thanks. Understand.