Dear Editor,

If Jamaica were put on the market today, what would be a fair asking price?

The idea of the US purchasing Canada to make it its 51st state has been floated by US President Donald Trump; it wasn’t taken seriously. One hopes that any offer of similar magnitude made to Jamaica would at least be put to the Jamaican people.

Consider the scale. Jamaica’s population is roughly 2.8 million, if we used a simple benchmark of per capita gross domestic product, with a floor of US$8,000 per citizen, the opening bid would be about US$10,000 per person. That puts the negotiation range near US$28 to US$30 billion.

Who could bid? The field is wide: the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union, India, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and regional partners in Africa and the Caribbean.

What would a buyer get? Market access. A US purchase, for example, would mean immediate, unfettered access to a market of roughly 345 million consumers.

For Jamaica, it would mean a reckoning with long-standing structural issues, including an estimated 1 million people living in informal settlements. For context, the entire population at Emancipation in 1838 was about 450,000.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable question: Is this the outcome Emancipation in 1838 and Independence in 1962 were meant to secure?

We may need what I will call a Strategic Solutions Service, not to sell the country, but to negotiate from a position of strength. Any serious conversation about Jamaica’s future must start with one principle: Every citizen with a taxpayer registration number gets accounted for in the deal, and no one gets less than the floor.

Jamaica is not for sale. But if we are going to talk price, let’s talk numbers, leverage, and terms, not slogans.

Michael Spence

micspen2@hotmail.com