Peter Espeut JAMAICA HAS been growing sugar cane since the Spaniards settled Seville on the north coast in 1509.
More than any other factor, the demands of the cultivation of sugar have shaped Jamaican society, economy and polity. Europeans came to make money from it, and brought - forcibly or otherwise - Africans, East Indians and Chinese to grow and cut it, creating Jamaica's ethnic diversity.
Power relations on the plantation shifted to the society at large, producing a colour-class hierarchy in almost every sphere of Jamaican life. The skewed distribution of land in Jamaica is traceable to the sugar plantation system, which tied up our best land in large plots in the hands of relatively few people.
There was a time when sugar was King, and the simile "as rich as a West Indian sugar planter" was true. Now sugar has been demoted from royalty to penury, but the social and economic fabric of Jamaica is still wrapped up in the plantation system from which we do not seem to be able to escape.In the days before industrialisation, the cultivation of sugar needed large supplies of manual (unskilled) labour, which is why the ancestors of most of us were brought here. Our education system was designed to protect the labour supply of the plantations (the Education Act was passed in 1834 at the same time as the Emancipation Act) and so the priority was "manual training." Only the elite of society were offered a high school education; the destiny of the vast majority was (sub-standard) elementary education which produced illiterates by the thousands, fit - you guessed it - only for manual work on the plantation.
For a while the tail wagged the dog. When economic efficiency demanded that we mechanise the sugar industry with mechanical harvesters, the workers and the unions bellowed in protest, and so our sugar industry remained tied to the machete, so that more of our intentionally under-educated citizens could have employment in an industry designed to keep them in poverty. The near-sighted politicians who took those decisions which could only kill our sugar industry and economy, should be forever vilified in the history books.
And even in the 20th century, our best land and most of our labour force is tied up and conformed by a crop which is in serious decline and in which there is no future. The handwriting has been on the wall for some time - that the days of preferential duties and prices which we, to some extent, still enjoy from our former colonial masters are numbered. But we have ignored that handwriting, and Hampden is the latest casualty; and the others cannot be far behind.
What are we waiting for? Are we waiting for every last sugar factory to close before we wake up and smell the coffee? We have got to begin to haul ourselves out of sugar plantation mode and choose a new basis on which we will conform our economy in this new millennium.
To what productive use are we going to put the tens of thousands of acres of agricultural lands now in sugar? Do we want to persist with agriculture? The fact of the matter is that - planned or not - much of our former sugar cane lands are being converted into low-cost housing - especially at Caymanas, Innswood and Bernard Lodge. If we want to do any meaningful cost-effective agriculture for export, we must have extensive acreages of flat land suitable for industrial production, harvest and processing, so we must sequester what we have left.
I am disappointed that our academic and agronomic 'ginnigogs' at the UWI have not been able to think up the alternative to sugar cane after over 50 years of fulminating against sugar and slavery. While Hawaii grows wealthy on our pineapples, and Cuba mass-produces our ortaniques, while the world seeks to copy our patties and our jerk-pork and our Easter bun, we can't find any crop or product to offer on the world export market.
Of course, industrial agriculture and agro-processing is not necessarily the only use to which our large tracts of cane lands could be put. I can envision square miles of industrial plants similar to those I have seen on the former cornfields of Ontario and Ohio. But we do not have the quality labour force to support that sort of activity; our population has been carefully trained in the use of the machete.
A few years ago I attended a meeting in Dayton, Ohio, the home of the Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop, Kettering's workshop where he invented the self-starter, and where so many other mechanical and electrical inventions took place. After a visit to the local museum where the story of Dayton was told, I could not help wondering what Jamaica would be like if we had a functional education system, and a climate of innovation and invention that stimulated the technical and scientific creativity of our people. When an education system prepares cogs to fit into a wheel, very little new can be expected to emerge.
It is still my dream and my hope that Jamaica can break out of the plantation mode she has been in for the last 500 years, to create a generation of creative thinkers and inventors who will develop new commodities which can launch us on the world stage the way our musicians and athletes have done. There is no doubt about the potential of our people, for we have produced the Lecky's and the Ugly Fruit and the aforementioned Ortanique. Take a trip to the Archives in Spanish Town and look at the list of patents for Jamaican inventions granted during the 19th century.
The trouble is that we do not have the quality leadership to bring it off, either in the public or the private sectors!
HECTOR WYNTER
My wife Velia and I are saddened at the untimely passing of Hector Wynter. Just a couple of weeks before his death we met at the King's House Concert at which she sang, and as usual, he complimented her on her voice and her performance. He was a gentleman and a lover of Jamaica. Our deepest sympathies to his wife Diana and the rest of the family.
He was the first Gleaner Editor-in-Chief to publish me. Decades ago I edited the Roman Catholic youth newspaper Leaven, and he reprinted my first editorial (titled, I remember, "On being negative") prominently in this newspaper. I was tickled pink, and that encouraged me to continue writing. We will miss him.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and executive director of an environment and development NGO.
