“But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.”

— Franklin D Roosevelt, nomination address at the Democratic National Convention July 2, 1932

In recent days I spent some time in my birth parish of St Mary, visiting kinfolk and friends. St Mary, with the possible exception of Portland and maybe St Ann, is Jamaica’s most beautiful parish in terms of its physical geography. Nowadays, the general absence of economic growth and development in many of the districts and towns in the parish, such as Richmond, Cane Heap, Goat Hill, Rock River, Highgate, Georgia, Devon Pen, Broad Gate, Junction, Zion Hill, Islington, and parts of Port Maria, to name few, conjure up in my head images of scenes from the movie The Grapes of Wrath starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine and others.

The Grapes of Wrath, a seminal book by John Steinbeck, was set in the era of the Great Depression in the USA. St Mary evidently is going through an economic depression, as is the rest of Jamaica, most may argue. Some years ago, [and I am not referring to 40 or 50 years] the parish had a giant banana and coconut industry, spectacularly impressive cocoa production, which gave rise to one of the finest chocolate confectioneries in the world — Highgate Chocolate.

The parish had a thriving rail service and tourism opportunities were expanding fast. Today, the parish in general is a desolate place economically. My observations of how this mighty parish has fallen made me read intently a story published in The Gleaner on March 26, 2014 entitled: ‘Gov’t urged to make fiscal discipline last beyond the IMF’.

The story read inter alia: “Both houses of Parliament last week passed amendments to the Financial Administration and Audit Act and the Public Bodies Management and Accountability Act, which form the framework for enhanced fiscal rules.

The rules, for example, impose limits on the finance minister, placing a burden on him to attain certain fiscal targets. For instance, as at the end of the 2017-2018 fiscal year, the minister is required to take appropriate measures to attain a fiscal balance, as a percentage of GDP, which would allow the debt-to-GDP ratio to fall to 60 per cent or less by 2026. The minister is also required to reduce the ratio of public sector wages as a per cent of GDP to nine per cent by March 31, 2016.

“At the time the IMF agreement was inked last April, Jamaica’s debt was 145 per cent of GDP and has since decreased to 139 per cent of GDP.”

While the Government is busy responding to the directives of the International Monetary Fund, and it has few choices admittedly, thousands of Jamaicans are falling through what is no longer a crack, but an economic sinkhole. It seems to me that the realities of the poorest people in Jamaica have largely been exorcised from the consciousness of this Administration.

The poor and the unemployed are now an invisible class. Ironic, since this Government says it is a champion of the poor. According to a recent study conducted by Dr Alanzo Smith, a member of the American Counselling Association of Adventists Family Life Professional, 1.1 million, or more than half of Jamaica’s population, are now living below the poverty line. In the Caribbean, only Haiti has more poor people than Jamaica.

During my visit to St Mary I supped with three families who were instrumental in my early development. The first family once owned an impressive shop, or to use their words, emporium and drinking pub in Richmond. Now retired, they lamented to me that if they had known that Jamaica was going to become what it has they would have followed the example of many of their relatives and left from the 70s and early 80s.

They recounted that Richmond was a town of businesses, almost rivalling Highgate and Port Maria as an entrepreneurial centre. “Today,” they exclaimed, “Richmond is like a ghost town after 7:00 pm and most of the numerous small shops and bars have closed over the last 25 years.”

The husband then began to list a number of parish economic entities that had either capitulated or were significantly skeletonised due to bad economic times. These, he said, included the Highgate Chocolate Factory, St Mary Banana Estate, and the Richmond Cocoa and Coffee Fermentation Plant. He noted that large and medium-scale cattle, goat and pig farming, which were big businesses in districts surrounding Richmond and Highgate, are but memories.

As I chatted with the two septuagenarians, I realised the vast disappointment they had in Jamaica. “When did Jamaica come to this?” the wife asked me directly. I neglected to answer, but instead continued to respectfully listen.

Now in their mid-70s, they were once huge suppliers of agricultural produce to markets in St Ann, St Catherine, Kingston, and as far as St Elizabeth. Their 40 hectares of land is now mostly overrun by shrubs, except for sprinklings of bananas, plantains, peppers, yams and other crops.

The wife, the more talkative partner, was not economical in her disgust for the high price of farming tools, lack of markets for produce, bad roads that hamper transportation and the scourge of praedial larceny.

“It’s no use farming anything because you cannot afford to grow it, ’cause fertiliser prices are so high, you cannot transport it because the cost is so high owing to bad roads, and most times the thieves come and collect theirs before you can say Amen,” she said.

While the couple are resigned to living out the rest of their days in Jamaica, they noted that they were very happy that their only daughter was now a trained nurse, married and living in England. She had no wish to ever come back to Jamaica to live permanently, they said.

“This country had such promise when we were young. We felt we could have achieved anything.”

“What happened?” I asked.

The husband chimed in: “A two-legged ‘PUSS’ [emphasis his] name politician. They have destroyed Jamaica.”

His wife disagreed. “It’s us, the people, we have destroyed Jamaica, all of us,” she said. “We, for example, discontinued the self-reliance policies and programmes of Michael (Manley) in the 70s.”

Her husband nodded approvingly and then a long period of silence ensued.

The second family, now in their early and late 70s, were educators. In their view Jamaica was at its worst point economically and otherwise. “Most of the young people are gone to Kingston, other town centres or abroad,” the husband noted.

“There is nothing here for them to do. Our district is now populated by persons who are either too old to leave or not able to leave.”

The wife, who was a school principal, warned that Jamaica’s education system was regressing instead of progressing. As a justice of the peace she said she was mortified at the level of hostility for the English Language which many graduates of high schools and universities demonstrated in their writings on forms she was often asked to sign.

She lamented that she had never felt so unsafe in her whole life and that crime in the country was just shocking. “I pray each night that they don’t kick down our door and murder us or worse,” she said.

Jamaica, they both agreed, had lost its way.

“Take Richmond Farm Prison, for example,” she said. “Not so many years ago that place was self-sufficient in meat, eggs, ground provisions and vegetables. There was furniture-making and other handicraft were taught to the inmates. They even had a band that would play at schools and churches around the parish on special occasions. Almost all of those activities have come to a crawl.”

Her husband interjected: “The day Edward Seaga left Jamaica House, that was the beginning of the end.”

He was gazed at quizzically by his wife.

I was somewhat surprised and saddened at the high levels of severe disappointment and jaded negativity of these seniors. Usually, cynicism is the preserve of the young. But these visits reinforced the reality that our countrymen and women are suffering from an almost total absence of hope at every age and stage.

Various polls and studies over the last 25 years on the question of how Jamaicans view their government and a future in Jamaica have shown that cynicism exists in abundance. It is now rock solid. Thousands of Jamaicans no longer see our country as the place where their fortunes, hopes and dreams can be realised. As a country we must take serious note of the Dust Bowl effect that lack of hope is having and will continue to engender on the morale of our people.

So while some of us are busy discussing micro and macroeconomic policies, thousands of Jamaicans are not seeing and/or feeling any benefits in their daily lives. While the Government is being urged to pay special attention to the creation of safety nets to protect the vulnerable and very poor, the very policies and programmes that are being pursued are cancelling out the ability of the Government to create any kind of real safety cushion for the most affected. We are truly in a conundrum.

Professor Denzil Williams, executive director of the Mona School of Business and Management at UWI, Mona, says: “Clearly, the heart of our problem is fiscal management. If you look at the data, I think it is about 13 years out of 50 that we have actually run a fiscal surplus. That is bad, and if you look at all the years that we have run a fiscal surplus, (they) are the years that we actually grew, and in some, we grew more than two per cent.”

Dr Damien King, head of the Department of Economics at the University of the West Indies, argues that the fiscal indiscipline that has prevented Jamaica from enjoying economic prosperity in the 51 years since Independence requires that the economic reforms continue beyond the current four-year economic support programme with the IMF.

However, a key ingredient missing from the equation and discussions is that thousands of Jamaicans no longer have hope. Thousands upon thousands no longer trust Government. People have grown battle-weary of the ‘belt tightening’; ‘bullet biting’, ‘belly banding’ and whichever other names that have been assigned to the requirements and effects of various structural adjustment programmes over the last 40 years.

It seems to me that above all else Jamaica now needs a leader who can inspire hope: Someone like a Franklin D Roosevelt who made people in general feel and think hope during one of the most ruinous periods in American history, the Great Depression.

St Mary needs a Marshall Plan, and Jamaica needs a new deal. JEEP is not it.

“When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”

— Franklin D Roosevelt, as quoted in the Kansas City Star (June 5, 1977)

NB: The families agreed that portions of our interactions would have been used for publication.

— Garfield Higgins is an educator and Journalist. Comments to higgins160@yahoo.com