FORMER president of the JLP’s young professional arm, Generation 2000 (G2K), Delano Seiveright, says he is not surprised that St Thomas is now ranked the poorest parish in Jamaica.

“With the pit latrine the most prevalent type of toilet facility used by households in St Thomas, accounting for 54.7 per cent of households, it comes as no surprise that the parish is ranked as Jamaica’s poorest,” Seiveright told the Jamaica Observer.

He said that with the parish’s history of underdevelopment, its elderly population is deemed to be the worst affected in the whole county.

Seiveright, who was named late last year as the Opposition party’s caretaker/candidate for the eastern St Thomas constituency, which is now represented by Minister of Health Dr Fenton Ferguson, said “the situation is extremely bad”.

“We have started a programme of handing out food and other basic necessities to the worst-affected every weekend, district by district. We really do need more help, and I am urging the few companies in St Thomas making millions from the parish to step up their corporate social responsibility,” he said.

“The Government, on the other hand, has failed the parish miserably; poverty has more than doubled from roughly 14 per cent in 2008 to 32.5 per cent or more today, according to the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions but, depending on how some of us measure poverty, I would say it exceeds 50 per cent,” he added.

The all-Jamaica individual poverty prevalence increased by 2.3 percentage points since 2010 to reach 19.9 per cent by 2012, according to the report of the annual survey released by the Planning Institute of Jamaica and Statistical Institute of Jamaica recently.

The report, tabled in the House of Representatives at the start of the current budget debate by Minister of Finance and Planning Dr Peter Phillips, revealed that St Thomas has become the most impoverished parish, with a 32.5 per cent prevalence, while St Mary, formerly considered the poorest parish, offered the least prevalence of poverty at 9.4 per cent.

Seiveright, who along with a growing number of young people from in and outside the parish, is carrying out an elderly charity outreach programme on weekends, says that approximately half of the parish’s labour force are unemployed.

In light of the paltry state of affairs in the parish, the caretaker/candidate said that on entering the constituency last year, he was appalled at the very high levels of poverty and neglect everywhere.

“The elderly are the worst affected. Their children have either abandoned them or are mired in poverty themselves. It’s a vicious cycle. Their health has deteriorated, many are basically blind and are left to live in houses that are literally falling apart. It is an absolutely unacceptable state of affairs. No human being should live like that,” Seiveright commented.

Seiveright also linked the high level of poverty to “very poor” representation over the years that, he said, has done nothing to arrest the decline in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors and diversify the parish’s economic base.

“Today, outside of sugar, which frankly pays peanuts, and remittances from family members overseas, there is not much left going on in St Thomas. I have spoken with several businessmen and women who have relocated to Kingston because they simply refuse to live there anymore. It’s a sad situation,” he stated.

In former years, the Bowden and Port Morant wharves were kept busy exporting sugar and bananas. Despite the interruption of the Panama disease, which led to the departure of the United Fruit Company, production continued into the early 2000s, but ended with the closure of the Eastern Banana Estate.

Most coconut farms were wiped out by the Lethal Yellowing disease, although Michael Black’s Farm in Nutts River stands as the parish’s premier coconut farm.

Seiveright said that there are only a few large properties being used for the production of coconut, sugar cane, bananas, and coffee. However, small farming is quite evident, with over 12,000 small farms, primarily subsistent in nature.

Although admitting that handouts are not the solution, he said “there is no sense in looking at a 72-year-old woman and telling her about grandiose development plans for the future when she needs food, toiletries and health care attention now.”

Seiveright said that he has also been able to establish a development task force since last year involving some of the parish’s most successful people, including two who now reside overseas.

“We are working on a pragmatic development plan that will very likely integrate highway development, agriculture, agro-processing, light manufacturing, port development, and tourism into a programme aimed at blasting the parish out of its long-running mode of underdevelopment and poverty,” he said.

The first step, according to him, is to build a “decent” highway for the parish. Despite bordering Jamaica’s capital city, Kingston, he said St Thomas is the only parish with a substandard main road which makes it very unattractive to investors.