Editorial | Westmoreland after Melissa

Even within the widespread destruction and human misery caused by Hurricane Melissa in western Jamaica, the parish of Westmoreland is a special special case. It is in need of urgent and specific interventions.

It is not merely that Westmoreland was the epicentre of the Category 5 storm, which made landfall at the community of New Hope, the hurricane laid bare – as several commentators have pointed out – the parish’s old problem of economic under-development and social inequities. Not least of these are the fragility of its land tenure and limited employment opportunities.

Before the hurricane, approximately 146,000 people lived in Westmoreland, or around 5.2 per cent of Jamaica’s population, based on the island’s recently published census data. These people lived in 54,600 dwellings.

According to the official estimates, 48 per cent of the homes in Westmoreland were either damaged or destroyed, second to the parish of St Elizabeth (56 per cent). Yet, for most observers, Westmoreland looks, and feels, worse.

That, in part, probably has to be with the parish’s housing stock and the general inadequacy thereof. Westmoreland has Jamaica’s largest concentration of wooden houses, which were especially vulnerable to Melissa’s sustained winds of 185 miles an hour and gusts of over 250mph.

The majority of these homes were built on stilts or some form of elevation – and not merely as protection against floods for people who lived near natural wetland areas. The larger story in this regard is about land tenure in the parish, a matter which Prime Minister Andrew Holness has on several occasions, including since the hurricane, vowed to address.

SUGAR-PRODUCING PARISH

Westmoreland used to be a major sugar-producing parish. Its residents, until the 1990s, primarily farmed sugarcane or worked at Frome sugar factory, from the old days when it was controlled by the British company, Tate and Lyle, through government ownership, and now a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned enterprise, COMPLANT.

Two related issues arise from Westmoreland’s socio-economic and socio-cultural history. The first relates to the long, slow atrophy of the sugar industry, until its essential collapse in the 1990s after the European Union (EU) ended the Caribbean’s preferential access to its market.

Jamaica could not compete. Sixty years ago, at the height of the island’s post-slavery output, Jamaica produced over 500,000 tonnes of raw sugar. Last year, it produced 35,000 tonnes. This year, output is expected to fall by around six per cent. The Frome factory has a rated capacity of 60,000 tonnes. In 2024 it produced 12,000 tonnes of sugar.

Over the past three decades Jamaica’s economy has shifted dramatically from export of commodities and some manufacturing to services, especially tourism, which has dominated the island’s north coast and sections of the west. Westmoreland, however, has been only a minor participant in the tourism boom.

Farmers displaced from sugar have gone into other crop production; some young people find jobs in service businesses; and others migrate from the parish. Notably, too, Westmoreland has become the epicentre of something else: lottery scamming – the scheme that shakes down mostly elderly foreigners by telling them they have won sweepstakes, but have to remit money for fees and taxes before collecting their winnings.

PART OF LEGACY

The inclination towards wooden houses and the propensity for these buildings to sit on piers, is part of the legacy of the sugar industry and land tenancy in the parish. Large tracts of land are in the hands of few owners and leasehold, rather than outright ownership, as well as squatting, are relatively common in Westmoreland. Which explains why wooden homes that are easy to move are common in the parish.

Said Prime Minister Holness last month, in the aftermath of the hurricane: “Persons build their homes on stilts because of a lack of permanence in their residential and land settlement arrangements, so that they have to move very often.

“It is something that has come up to us from the policy level that we will have to address. What we are doing now is to use this opportunity to see how best we can regularise many of the persons who have been occupying lands informally. It is an opportunity to bring…permanence and to look at the plight of many citizens who have not had the benefit of land security.”

According to a 2024 World Bank report, based on 2021 data, Westmoreland isn’t Jamaica’s poorest parish. It was fifth (22 per cent), at a time when poverty rates had spiralled because of the COVID 19 pandemic. But beyond the direct poverty, Westmoreland faces deep structural issues, which have been exposed, and are likely to be exacerbated by the hurricane.

Indeed, the aftermath people in Westmoreland seem even more dazed than those in other affected parishes. And it hasn’t helped, independent observers say, that the official rescue efforts appear not to have sufficiently reached large numbers of people, especially in the parish’s remote regions.

It seems clear that Westmoreland needs particular attention. Writing in this newspaper, Debbie-Ann Gordon, a Westmoreland-born lawyer, argued: “Westmoreland is not simply one parish among many. It is a major disaster zone. Its geographic exposure and longstanding socioeconomic challenges require a designed recovery programme, not standardised procedures. Without this, historical inequities will deepen.”

Many people will agree with Ms Gordon.