Several of Jamaica’s leading exporters say it appears that governments envy those who are making money in the economy and do everything to frustrate them.

Lasco chairman and CEO Lascelles Chin, used the term “envy”; Montego Bay businessman Mark Kerr-Jarrett said “covetous” and immediate past president of the Jamaica Exporters’ Association (JEA) Dr Andre Gordon called it “anti-business”.

The exporters were discussing the difficulties facing the export sector and suggestions to take the industry forward at the first “Chairman’s Lunch” for 2007, hosted last week by Observer chairman, Gordon ‘Butch’ Stewart at the newspaper’s Beechwood Avenue offices in Kingston.

Stewart, who has been hosting the series of lunches since mid-last year to give the various sectors a forum for discussing problems and solutions, said it was time for a better calibre of leadership in the sector.

On a suggestion from Dr Gordon, Stewart spontaneously offered US$100,000 to the crafting of a comprehensive export policy to drive the sector.

The exporters largely concluded that Jamaica was not business-friendly and blamed the Government for not doing enough to encourage businesses.

Former JEA head Karl James complained: “If you are making money, it’s termed ganja-selling or something else.”

Lasco’s Chin said: “One gets the feeling that the authorities envy the private sector for the progress we are making and do everything to prevent us from doing it.”

Speaking passionately, Kerr-Jerr told the luncheon: “My experience in 20 years is that we are paying the full penalty of the ’70s where we lost 50 per cent of our managers and with them their first and second generations who would have come up into management positions as well.

“A lot of us who would like to be in representational politics. actually have to be behind our desk driving our companies because of the lack of qualified middle and upper management, which has left a vacuum at the representation level.

“This has been filled by, unfortunately, unsuitable characters who have no business experience, do not understand how an economy runs and are incapable of formulating and/or implementing policies which are business-friendly and will drive a nation.”

He added: “They do not understand the phenomenon that less is more in a lot of instances and that there is a time period between investment and return and so they have got this kind of covetous nature among them in regards to the private sector and that has to be eradicated.”

Marjorie Kennedy, the newly elected JEA president, suggested that the better calibre of leaders would come when entrepreneurship was promoted early in the school system, in order to remove the stigma that only the “dunce” goes into business and only “dons make millions”.

“An entrepreneur is somebody that is a risk-taker. We have people who are lawyers and lecturers and so they never know what it is to struggle to find the pay roll,” said Kennedy. “That takes a different thought process all together. I think we need to influence from the beginning, from the school, that people need to go into business.”

Gordon said that the attitude of bureaucracy to businessmen was such that if one did not personally know an official, not much progress could be made. He said there was a stigma attached to entrepreneurship, which bred an anti-business mentality among bureaucrats.