Dennis Morrison, Contributor

"Ongle yam cheap a market today, Mr Morrison," concluded Marlene, my housekeeper, as we left Coronation Market two Saturdays ago. We had just struggled to find my regular vendors who were shifted from their usual spots to make way for the refurbishing work under way at the market.

With vendors forced to squeeze their makeshift stalls into the limited space, this intensified the jostling by shoppers to be served and to get through the overcrowded pathways.

But what was really influencing the mood reflected in Marlene's hyperbole was the spike in prices, in some cases, to levels well above those paid on 'Grand Market' day when prices are at their peak. Like a recurring decimal, damage to crops from another storm system ('Nicole') is again to blame. This time, prices of vegetables are multiples of what would usually obtain in November, although 'Nicole' was mild compared with 'Ivan', or other hurricanes/storms that hit us in 2005, 2007, and 2008.

Biggest increases

The biggest increases were for cabbage, which tripled from $30 per lb in September to $100, lettuce, which jumped from $80 to $250, cooking tomato from $50 to $180, and salad tomato from $80 to $260 per lb. In sharp contrast, the prices of these items had actually gone down or been stable between September and November last year when there was no hurricane activity. Cabbage dropped from $70 to $40, or by nearly 50 per cent, lettuce fell from $180 to $80, or by about 60 per cent, and tomato prices hardly moved.

Though less dramatic, the impact of hurricane damage on other crops was obvious. The escalation in domestic food prices, when combined with the surge in oil and grain prices, will aggravate cost-of-living pressures for the rest of the year.

This is not a pretty picture in an economy that is contracting, where the unemployment rate is climbing, and where wages have been frozen for a sizeable body of workers. While it may be very difficult to protect against the vagaries of international grain markets, the constant battering from extreme weather over the past 15 to 20 years should have driven us to modify our production process for some domestic food crops. Serious investment in greenhouse technology would certainly have mitigated hurricane/storm damage to local output of vegetables and boosted our low productivity.

The problem is that Jamaican agriculture has failed to use modern technology as a catalyst to spur expansion of production for food crops and make the sector less susceptible to losses from drought and hurricanes. Instead, our food-production system is still relying on peasant farming and the practices used by freed slaves at the time of Emancipation, more than 170 years ago. Their production was geared to their own domestic use, supplying any surpluses to local markets.

In a modern economy, our agricultural sector has to be based on commercial production and should not be organised around subsistence farming if it is to be sustainable. The failure to transform this vital sector is manifested in falling output and uncompetitive costs. The consequence is that we have a ballooning food-import bill that is contributing to the unsustainable deficit in our balance of payments.

Another effect is our inability to generate the kind of economic growth that should have occurred with the expansion of the tourist industry in the past eight years. That industry has increasingly been dependent on imported vegetables and other foods, and most recently, faced severe shortages of basic supplies like lettuce and tomatoes. Without a revitalised agricultural sector, we are also hardly likely to arrest rural decay, and the rural-urban drift will continue to fuel crime.

The encouraging side to my last trip to 'Curry' was the noticeable progress being made in the refurbishing works that Digicel is underwriting. As this newspaper rightly pointed out in its November 15 editorial, the Ireland-based telecoms company has put prime ministers, ministers of local government, and municipal administrations of the last 25 years to shame. Collectively, they failed to reverse the degeneration of downtown Kingston, which was once the "prime commercial and administrative centre of the city and the whole country".

'Pretty talk'

All were full of pretty talk but did little or nothing to tackle the root causes of the city's demise - crime, run-down infrastructure, and the breakdown in public services. Meanwhile, waterfront redevelopment had become a catalyst for economic growth in cities worldwide.

Yet, despite the abject neglect, downtown Kingston has remained the country's main distribution centre for local ground provisions, and the biggest shopping area for the working classes of the Kingston Metropolitan region.

Up to the early 1960s, Kingston had one of the Caribbean's leading market districts. With its naturally beautiful waterfront, the development potential of the area is still great, and with decisive action, it could recapture its former glory.

Could Digicel's investment be a catalyst for the regeneration of Kingston's city centre? Not without bold and visionary leadership.

Dennis Morrison is an economist. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.