The latest survey of living conditions in Jamaica, in which consumption is used as proxy for income, was published last week and officials were happy to trumpet a further decline in poverty in the country.

By this measure, the proportion of Jamaicans living below the poverty line declined last year to 14.8 per cent, from 16.9 per cent in 2004. This is relatively good news, despite the warning by Dr. Wesley Hughes that it will be particularly difficult to pull poverty in Jamaica into single digit. The significant problem here, according to Dr. Hughes, is education underachievement in the country. This translates to a surfeit of untrained people and, therefore, a labour force of marginal productivity.

Dr. Hughes believes that the best answer to this problem, in the short term, is to drive construction and domestic agriculture, which have the ability to take up substantial amounts of unskilled labour. We suspect, as is often the case when this issue is highlighted, that there will be substantial debate over what to do about the state of education in Jamaica and the levers that must be pulled if we are to generate the investment and growth necessary to increase output, lower poverty and enhance living standards.

But there is another significant, and related issue, in the survey findings to which, we believe, sufficient attention is not yet being paid, but demands significant focus if Jamaica is not, in a couple of decades, to find itself in a social quagmire worse than what we complain about today. The issue to which we refer is the greying of Jamaica.

The latest data point to the fact that in 2005 approximately 10 per cent of the Jamaican population was 65 or over, which, in percentage terms, is nearly double what it was 35 years ago - 5.4 per cent. Indeed, this increase in the elderly population has been steady: 6.9 per cent in 1982; 8.6 per cent in 1991.

This greying of Jamaica is an index of success in some areas, not least of which is the fact that health care delivery has reached a point where life expectancy, at 73, has reached First-World standards. It also points to success of a population policy that has slowed the rate of population growth, through a myriad of family planning programmes over the past 35 years.

For example, in 1970, nearly 45 per cent of Jamaica's population was aged between zero and 14. A dozen years later, it was 38.4 per cent. It is now 32 per cent. Family sizes are smaller, the fertility rate is lower and women are beginning to delay pregnancies.

So the demographics are shifting and we are increasing the number of older people in the population. Our sense is, though, we are not yet beginning to plan for how we deal with this growing segment. For instance, older people will demand more social services as well place pressure on private and State pension systems, which, as of now, are already inadequate. Health care delivery is another pertinent issue.

It seems to us that the emerging demographics require us to ask about the consequences of, say, a leadership dipping its hands into a pension fund to 'borrow' $1 billion at below market rates or how an underperforming economy will produce the surplus to fund future needs.