KINGSTON, Jamaica — Leader of the Opposition Mark Golding has called for the urgent rollout of a ‘Marshall Plan’ for micro, small and medium enterprises devastated by Hurricane Melissa, warning that thousands of businesses across western and central Jamaica remain crippled months after the storm.

According to a release on Thursday, Golding  while addressing the Small Business Association of Jamaica’s Growth and Resilience Conference 2026 at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel, said businesses in much of Westmoreland, St Elizabeth, Hanover, St James, Trelawny and even parts of Manchester have suffered lasting damage to their productive capacity.

“Many of these small businesses are uninsured. Many have suffered losses to their physical assets and their stock. They need help, and they need it fast,” he said.

Golding warned that this is unfolding in a deteriorating economy, with negative growth in the last quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, tax revenues running some $20 billion behind budget for the first two months of this Fiscal year, May’s point-to-point inflation of 6.7 per cent being above the target range being pursued by the Bank of Jamaica, and international energy and transportation costs rising amidst the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Europe.

“In a time of economic contraction, we cannot adopt a pro-cyclical approach to managing the economy. We have to be more creative. We have to be bolder,” he said.

With the fiscal rules suspended for this fiscal year, he argued, the Government has both the leeway and the responsibility to act decisively. He cautioned, however, that headline announcements are not enough, pointing to frequent programmes in which billions of dollars budgeted for small business have not reached the intended beneficiaries and are returned to the Consolidated Fund.

Golding endorsed the SBAJ’s description of small businesses as the bedrock of the Jamaican economy and called for a nurturing environment across the tax, registration, licensing and permitting systems, and for more granular work to ensure that announced policies actually have the desired impact.

“There are serious problems, and they must be addressed in a real way. If we do that attentively, working together, we can build a much stronger economy and a better Jamaica,” he said.