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Selling Jamaica short
John Maxwell
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Half a century ago, when the university was near the centre of theatrical activity in Jamaica, I fell in with a group of amateur actors inspired by Errol Hill and Derek Walcott.
Hill was the UWI's Extra-Mural drama tutor and Derek was spending his fourth university year consuming the library instead of pursuing the Diploma in Education meant to qualify him as a teacher.
As it has turned out, Derek didn't need the DipEd. He took the Nobel Prize instead.
Anyway, although I had no talent as an actor, I enjoyed the business, so for a few weeks I was a member of a group spending night after night rehearsing Derek's play, The Sea at Dauphin. With the playwright present often enough, we rehearsed at a little wooden house at Half-Way-Tree called rather grandly, 'Toc H' Hall, where ex-servicemen of the First World War used to gather before there was a Curphey Place.
In that little building there was a library - really a couple of bookshelves, and since I cannot resist a bookshelf, I quickly became immersed in reading some of the old, moth-eaten books there.
One of them whose name and author I have long forgotten was a travelogue on the West Indies. The opening line on Jamaica arrested me and I have never forgotten it. It said words to the effect that Jamaica's topography, geography and micro-climates were so various that the country could be described as a mini-continent.
I've used that phrase before in these columns and I have since been surprised to see it turning up in television travel advertisements for Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but never for Jamaica.
The writer of that long forgotten book had been to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but it was on Jamaica that he bestowed his mini-continent description.
We Jamaicans have never really appreciated what we have, although our people are the ones who have maintained its beauty as well as tearing down some of it.
It seems a shame that such an apt description of Jamaica should be forgotten by us and be used by our competitors - if one forgets where our heads are.
The land of look elsewhere
Years ago, in another column, I said that Jamaica's cultural resources, specifically its food and its people, were not employed as well as they might because those with the money didn't know either the food or the people.
Not much has changed.
Last week, I walked into a supermarket and nearly collapsed with astonishment when I saw that the pawpaws for sale there had been imported from the United States. June plum juice is also apparently imported, believe it or not.
Our failures have been grand, but not magnificent. Pawpaws were first seen by Europeans in Jamaica whence Christopher Columbus took them to Spain. There they became known as the fruit of the angels. These days Jamaica is a backwater in papaw growing. Same thing with the pineapple, indigenous to Jamaica.
Same sad old, old, story.
The Spanish took the papaya as they called it, to the Philippines, where it is produced by the thousands of tons. The pineapple was taken by Americans to Hawaii, where it produced fruit-processing and shipping empires.
Even the tomato was first seen in the United States on one of Lorenzo Dow Baker's banana boats.
We have missed the boat over and over again, because those who manage our societies, public and private, are by and large ignorant of Jamaica or perhaps, ashamed of Jamaica.
For decades our gaze has been directed outwards, while we produce what we don't consume and consume what we don't produce - a sure recipe for economic indigestion.
Bauxite and tourism are similarly skewed. Jamaica is half bauxite and half limestone. We have been willing to ship away our precious soils cheaply when we could have produced and been producing much more from them by farming. Bauxite has left deserts behind and poisoned our water underground.
As I said last week, one of our most serious mistakes, more than a century ago but still in train, was in pushing the small farmers into the hillsides from whence cometh our rivers and our fertility, washed into the sea to kill fish and destroy coral reefs and beaches.
The inauguration of a new government is a good time for a nation to reconsider its situation and its options, neither of which can be defined by political party manifestoes.
Time for change?
If the PNP 1997 Manifesto's promises had been fulfilled, or even properly launched, we would now be living in a demi-paradise.
It failed not because of money; it didn't need much, but because of the political will.
Mr Patterson and his advisers saw Jamaica as Lenin and Khrushchev saw the virgin lands of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - ripe for conquest, subjugation and conversion into capitalist-style productivity. Poor Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - the Aral Sea which provided the water for irrigation meant to grow Everests of wheat is now almost gone. A resource, which contained a substantial proportion of the world's fresh water is now partly desert, partly swamp and utterly desolate. Where the water was once 60 feet deep, rusting ships lie stranded with weeds growing between their plates of steel.
The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth largest lake - five times the size of Jamaica and with enough water to cover this island one mile deep.
The 1954 World Bank Report on Jamaica contains a sentence which has stayed with me since I read the report: "In Jamaica, absolute ownership of land has meant in practice the right of the owner to ruin the land in his own way."
In Jamaica, our governors have seen themselves as the absolute owners of our land, with the right to destroy it in their own way. Only Norman Manley thought otherwise.
Mr Patterson was a horse of a different colour, deciding to plant superhighways, housing schemes and hotel developments wherever he chose. We embarrassed him into saving Hope Gardens from the developer's bulldozer. We were unable to stop him raping Long Mountain or creating the monstrosity of the Doomsday Highway or selling our beaches for a song to the Spaniards and others and our bauxite in perpetuity, it seems, to Marc Rich and Alcoa.
Jamaica is the attraction
Now that we have a new minister of tourism, I had hoped for a fresh approach to the industry. If tourism is supposed to matter to Jamaicans, can anyone tell me how many Jamaicans are directly employed to the industry and what proportion of the tourism product is Jamaican?I find it scandalous that a waitress in one of Montego Bay's top hotels should be making just a little more than the national minimum wage, and this after several years' service.
I find it scandalous that so much of what is consumed in hotels is imported from abroad, not just from the United States, but also from our competitors - the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, even including manpower.
The problem with manpower and with everything else in Jamaica is that we have not invested enough in our people. We can always cry 'poor mouth' when we plead for work permits for foreigners, but why should we be able to do so? If Jamaicans cannot be found to fulfil the tasks needed by the industry, is it the fault of the people or is it the fault of successive governments?
Years ago a visitor to Negril told me that it was some days after he had been in the island that he realised that he was in Jamaica. Up to the fourth day he had been fed a steady diet of imported culture and food, and felt that he could have been almost anywhere in the tropical world.
The situation is even worse in the so-called cruise shipping industry, which is almost entirely parasitic growth draining money from our economies and polluting our waters.
Cruise ships are floating hotels with no fixed place of business, itinerant trollops of the seas, buying their supplies cheap - water from Jamaica, for instance -and selling their services dear.
While our people are denied significant employment in these floating monstrosities, we are asked to build cruise ship piers, casinos and miniature zoos for the delectation of our 'visitors'. The problem with our visitors is that only their feet touch this country, most of their money never does.
If we want to increase our tourism intake, the surest way would be to ban the cruise ships. The people on these ships are attracted by the name of Jamaica, by its culture, by Harry Belafonte and Bob Marley, Toots, Shaggy and the rest. They may dance to the recorded music of these people, but they have more chance of seeing them in concert in their own countries than they have of seeing them in Jamaica.The new minister of tourism, Ed Bartlett, talks glibly about building golf courses, apparently unaware of the fact that nearly 40 per cent of Jamaicans do not have a piped water supply and many have no supply of drinkable water at all.
Golf courses on the other hand, like alumina refineries, consume millions of gallons a day as do the Spanish hotels which process tourists like Chicago meat packing plants 100 years ago. The difference is, while the only thing they use of Jamaica is the 'squeal'; the meat packers used everything of the pig except the squeal.
Thirty years ago as chairman of the NRCA, I proposed that we should take over the office of the superintendent of public gardens and with it all the public gardens: Bath, Cinchona, Castleton and Hope, take over the Fern Gully and turn it into a public garden, take over Laughing Water and convert it into an arboretum for Jamaican orchids and bromeliads and later, take over some of the government experimental stations.
We wanted to assume control of parts of Hellshire, the Great Morasses in Negril, Black River, Falmouth and St Thomas, as well, but that was to be in the future. All of this was to preserve the integrity of the Jamaican landscape, notwithstanding the fact that some of the gardens contained many exotic imports. They would, nevertheless, have been excellent places for teaching and first-class visitor attractions in their own right.
I needn't tell you that we were turned down. We never got past Fern Gully.
A decade and a half later, one of the reasons justifying the destruction of Hope was that it was in a state of neglect.
It isn't that we do not have dozens of world-class attractions; the problem is that most of them can't be successfully privatised. Ergo, we have no attractions, except that the only natural one in the present mix is Dunn's River Falls, effectively stolen from the Jamaican people for the enrichment of the UDC. It also happens to be the most popular. Despite the hokum, people don't come to Jamaica for the casinos.
I want as humbly as I can, to suggest to the new prime minister, the new government and to the people of Jamaica that we should look to our own resources:
. First: most of them need no huge sums of money to make them viable;
.Second: because they will give our visitors a better idea of the landscape which produced that remarkable race called Jamaicans; and
.Third: because exploiting them, in the best sense, is a major route to our economic development, giving people skills and jobs which will take them out of poverty, off the streets and off the backs of visitors.
We all know that the major problem with tourism is that the benefits, which should matter to us, are largely absent, except in a few fairly well-known cases. Sandals, whose owner owns this newspaper, is one such. But one swallow doesn't make a meal, and the Jamaican tourist industry as a whole, gorges itself on foreign products, denying Jamaicans their just desserts.
If we want a first-class tourism industry, accepted and welcomed by Jamaicans, we should bring tourism to the people; to the country and send the cruise ships (floating and land-based) packing.
And finally, I would suggest that if the Jamaican government wants some real international credibility and respectability, in addition to returning to the voluntary UN protocol on Human Rights, it should immediately ratify the SPAW protocol to the Cartagena convention.
Then, for the first time at last, we would have a Jamaican government which could be proud of its environmental record as well as its respect for human rights.
Copyright 2007 ©John Maxwell
[email protected]
[img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/notworthy.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/notworthy.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70458-applaud.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70458-applaud.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70458-applaud.gif[/img]
John Maxwell
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Half a century ago, when the university was near the centre of theatrical activity in Jamaica, I fell in with a group of amateur actors inspired by Errol Hill and Derek Walcott.
Hill was the UWI's Extra-Mural drama tutor and Derek was spending his fourth university year consuming the library instead of pursuing the Diploma in Education meant to qualify him as a teacher.
As it has turned out, Derek didn't need the DipEd. He took the Nobel Prize instead.
Anyway, although I had no talent as an actor, I enjoyed the business, so for a few weeks I was a member of a group spending night after night rehearsing Derek's play, The Sea at Dauphin. With the playwright present often enough, we rehearsed at a little wooden house at Half-Way-Tree called rather grandly, 'Toc H' Hall, where ex-servicemen of the First World War used to gather before there was a Curphey Place.
In that little building there was a library - really a couple of bookshelves, and since I cannot resist a bookshelf, I quickly became immersed in reading some of the old, moth-eaten books there.
One of them whose name and author I have long forgotten was a travelogue on the West Indies. The opening line on Jamaica arrested me and I have never forgotten it. It said words to the effect that Jamaica's topography, geography and micro-climates were so various that the country could be described as a mini-continent.
I've used that phrase before in these columns and I have since been surprised to see it turning up in television travel advertisements for Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but never for Jamaica.
The writer of that long forgotten book had been to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but it was on Jamaica that he bestowed his mini-continent description.
We Jamaicans have never really appreciated what we have, although our people are the ones who have maintained its beauty as well as tearing down some of it.
It seems a shame that such an apt description of Jamaica should be forgotten by us and be used by our competitors - if one forgets where our heads are.
The land of look elsewhere
Years ago, in another column, I said that Jamaica's cultural resources, specifically its food and its people, were not employed as well as they might because those with the money didn't know either the food or the people.
Not much has changed.
Last week, I walked into a supermarket and nearly collapsed with astonishment when I saw that the pawpaws for sale there had been imported from the United States. June plum juice is also apparently imported, believe it or not.
Our failures have been grand, but not magnificent. Pawpaws were first seen by Europeans in Jamaica whence Christopher Columbus took them to Spain. There they became known as the fruit of the angels. These days Jamaica is a backwater in papaw growing. Same thing with the pineapple, indigenous to Jamaica.
Same sad old, old, story.
The Spanish took the papaya as they called it, to the Philippines, where it is produced by the thousands of tons. The pineapple was taken by Americans to Hawaii, where it produced fruit-processing and shipping empires.
Even the tomato was first seen in the United States on one of Lorenzo Dow Baker's banana boats.
We have missed the boat over and over again, because those who manage our societies, public and private, are by and large ignorant of Jamaica or perhaps, ashamed of Jamaica.
For decades our gaze has been directed outwards, while we produce what we don't consume and consume what we don't produce - a sure recipe for economic indigestion.
Bauxite and tourism are similarly skewed. Jamaica is half bauxite and half limestone. We have been willing to ship away our precious soils cheaply when we could have produced and been producing much more from them by farming. Bauxite has left deserts behind and poisoned our water underground.
As I said last week, one of our most serious mistakes, more than a century ago but still in train, was in pushing the small farmers into the hillsides from whence cometh our rivers and our fertility, washed into the sea to kill fish and destroy coral reefs and beaches.
The inauguration of a new government is a good time for a nation to reconsider its situation and its options, neither of which can be defined by political party manifestoes.
Time for change?
If the PNP 1997 Manifesto's promises had been fulfilled, or even properly launched, we would now be living in a demi-paradise.
It failed not because of money; it didn't need much, but because of the political will.
Mr Patterson and his advisers saw Jamaica as Lenin and Khrushchev saw the virgin lands of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - ripe for conquest, subjugation and conversion into capitalist-style productivity. Poor Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan - the Aral Sea which provided the water for irrigation meant to grow Everests of wheat is now almost gone. A resource, which contained a substantial proportion of the world's fresh water is now partly desert, partly swamp and utterly desolate. Where the water was once 60 feet deep, rusting ships lie stranded with weeds growing between their plates of steel.
The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth largest lake - five times the size of Jamaica and with enough water to cover this island one mile deep.
The 1954 World Bank Report on Jamaica contains a sentence which has stayed with me since I read the report: "In Jamaica, absolute ownership of land has meant in practice the right of the owner to ruin the land in his own way."
In Jamaica, our governors have seen themselves as the absolute owners of our land, with the right to destroy it in their own way. Only Norman Manley thought otherwise.
Mr Patterson was a horse of a different colour, deciding to plant superhighways, housing schemes and hotel developments wherever he chose. We embarrassed him into saving Hope Gardens from the developer's bulldozer. We were unable to stop him raping Long Mountain or creating the monstrosity of the Doomsday Highway or selling our beaches for a song to the Spaniards and others and our bauxite in perpetuity, it seems, to Marc Rich and Alcoa.
Jamaica is the attraction
Now that we have a new minister of tourism, I had hoped for a fresh approach to the industry. If tourism is supposed to matter to Jamaicans, can anyone tell me how many Jamaicans are directly employed to the industry and what proportion of the tourism product is Jamaican?I find it scandalous that a waitress in one of Montego Bay's top hotels should be making just a little more than the national minimum wage, and this after several years' service.
I find it scandalous that so much of what is consumed in hotels is imported from abroad, not just from the United States, but also from our competitors - the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, even including manpower.
The problem with manpower and with everything else in Jamaica is that we have not invested enough in our people. We can always cry 'poor mouth' when we plead for work permits for foreigners, but why should we be able to do so? If Jamaicans cannot be found to fulfil the tasks needed by the industry, is it the fault of the people or is it the fault of successive governments?
Years ago a visitor to Negril told me that it was some days after he had been in the island that he realised that he was in Jamaica. Up to the fourth day he had been fed a steady diet of imported culture and food, and felt that he could have been almost anywhere in the tropical world.
The situation is even worse in the so-called cruise shipping industry, which is almost entirely parasitic growth draining money from our economies and polluting our waters.
Cruise ships are floating hotels with no fixed place of business, itinerant trollops of the seas, buying their supplies cheap - water from Jamaica, for instance -and selling their services dear.
While our people are denied significant employment in these floating monstrosities, we are asked to build cruise ship piers, casinos and miniature zoos for the delectation of our 'visitors'. The problem with our visitors is that only their feet touch this country, most of their money never does.
If we want to increase our tourism intake, the surest way would be to ban the cruise ships. The people on these ships are attracted by the name of Jamaica, by its culture, by Harry Belafonte and Bob Marley, Toots, Shaggy and the rest. They may dance to the recorded music of these people, but they have more chance of seeing them in concert in their own countries than they have of seeing them in Jamaica.The new minister of tourism, Ed Bartlett, talks glibly about building golf courses, apparently unaware of the fact that nearly 40 per cent of Jamaicans do not have a piped water supply and many have no supply of drinkable water at all.
Golf courses on the other hand, like alumina refineries, consume millions of gallons a day as do the Spanish hotels which process tourists like Chicago meat packing plants 100 years ago. The difference is, while the only thing they use of Jamaica is the 'squeal'; the meat packers used everything of the pig except the squeal.
Thirty years ago as chairman of the NRCA, I proposed that we should take over the office of the superintendent of public gardens and with it all the public gardens: Bath, Cinchona, Castleton and Hope, take over the Fern Gully and turn it into a public garden, take over Laughing Water and convert it into an arboretum for Jamaican orchids and bromeliads and later, take over some of the government experimental stations.
We wanted to assume control of parts of Hellshire, the Great Morasses in Negril, Black River, Falmouth and St Thomas, as well, but that was to be in the future. All of this was to preserve the integrity of the Jamaican landscape, notwithstanding the fact that some of the gardens contained many exotic imports. They would, nevertheless, have been excellent places for teaching and first-class visitor attractions in their own right.
I needn't tell you that we were turned down. We never got past Fern Gully.
A decade and a half later, one of the reasons justifying the destruction of Hope was that it was in a state of neglect.
It isn't that we do not have dozens of world-class attractions; the problem is that most of them can't be successfully privatised. Ergo, we have no attractions, except that the only natural one in the present mix is Dunn's River Falls, effectively stolen from the Jamaican people for the enrichment of the UDC. It also happens to be the most popular. Despite the hokum, people don't come to Jamaica for the casinos.
I want as humbly as I can, to suggest to the new prime minister, the new government and to the people of Jamaica that we should look to our own resources:
. First: most of them need no huge sums of money to make them viable;
.Second: because they will give our visitors a better idea of the landscape which produced that remarkable race called Jamaicans; and
.Third: because exploiting them, in the best sense, is a major route to our economic development, giving people skills and jobs which will take them out of poverty, off the streets and off the backs of visitors.
We all know that the major problem with tourism is that the benefits, which should matter to us, are largely absent, except in a few fairly well-known cases. Sandals, whose owner owns this newspaper, is one such. But one swallow doesn't make a meal, and the Jamaican tourist industry as a whole, gorges itself on foreign products, denying Jamaicans their just desserts.
If we want a first-class tourism industry, accepted and welcomed by Jamaicans, we should bring tourism to the people; to the country and send the cruise ships (floating and land-based) packing.
And finally, I would suggest that if the Jamaican government wants some real international credibility and respectability, in addition to returning to the voluntary UN protocol on Human Rights, it should immediately ratify the SPAW protocol to the Cartagena convention.
Then, for the first time at last, we would have a Jamaican government which could be proud of its environmental record as well as its respect for human rights.
Copyright 2007 ©John Maxwell
[email protected]
[img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/notworthy.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/notworthy.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70458-applaud.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70458-applaud.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70458-applaud.gif[/img]
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