Julian 'Jingles' Reynolds, Contributor
When the opportunity of accessing a grant through the European Union (EU) proposal No. 2002/-1 Rural Diversification and Enterprise Development programme was announced earlier this year, a group of local entrepreneurs welcomed it as a serious attempt to address rural poverty and underdevelopment by establishing a sustainable socio-economic programme for eastern Jamaica, in communities where the banana industry was suffering major curtailment.
Access to affordable capital alongside sound management techniques for the agricultural sector remain the fundamental problems preventing poverty eradication in rural Jamaica. With the Development Bank of Jamaica, the Export Import Bank of Jamaica and the commercial banking sector not accepting and addressing this, the announced EU grant presented a way out, and the chance to demonstrate what could be done given the opportunity of accessing required capital.
The overall objective of the Rural Diversification and Enterprise Development proposal is (at a minimum) an opportunity to halt the decline in the living standards of farmers, farm workers, port workers, and community residents in the banana-producing areas in the short and long term, and, equally important, an opportunity to improve their current status.
After several meetings involving scores of interested, eager parties from three parishes, we assembled three groups - Woodside Community Development Action Group (St Mary), Spring Garden Farmers' Group (Portland), Springfield Farmers' Group (St Thomas) - representing 120 farm families, directly benefiting 600 people based on average household size of five, and indirectly benefiting 1,200 people, as well as the wider communities at large. These three groups brought 300 acres of both flatlands and hillside to the project.
Distinguished record
The Woodside group has had a distinguished record in group and social-capital formation, self-help projects, quality leadership, broad-based membership, both institutional and individual, and is a model of a successful community-based organisation of which there are few in the east and Jamaica at large. However, based on the EU's criteria, none of these groups individually or together had the capital requirements to access the grant. So, they could not apply directly and had to engage a sponsor.
The total budget we submitted to execute the programme over 18 months is $75,644,977, of which the applicant must contribute 15 per cent.
We turned to the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS), as most of the participants from the three communities were JAS members, and as this was the type of capacity building in the agricultural and agro-processing sectors that the JAS should be spearheading. To our dismay, what was clearly the most advanced production-driven application for the EU grant was denied.
We felt confident that together we could accomplish our objective to transform eastern Jamaica by infusing this project in these three communities. Individually, we conceived, initiated and helped in the writing of the grant proposal. Each person has over 35 years' experience in agricultural develop-ment, processing, marketing, export-import managing, policy making and grant writing.
We have experience working across Jamaica, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the wider Caribbean, with extensive contacts and connections in these countries. Our project is expected to provide support for an increase in the production of marketable agricultural products by providing extension inputs, encouragement and incentives for farmers to reallocate lands from production for home consumption to production for sale. It is also expected to establish a modern non-traditional crop-processing and marketing system for local and export markets at a 30:70 ratio.
The 58-page proposal document we submitted to the EU has outputs that are expected to be realised from the interventions and activities:
Continuously, we hear of international grants not taken up for lack of qualification by potential Jamaican applicants. And often we see foreign-based organisations continuing to receive these grants but see very little real productive impact on the local communities which are to benefit from these grants. We, therefore, question the intent and the methodology of these announced grants.
We challenge anyone inside or outside the European Union Banana Support Programme, the Rural Agriculture Development Agency and the Government of Jamaica to present a document that addresses agricultural production and productivity as ours does. We put up the money required to research and write this grant application and built up the expectations of hundreds of people in these communities longing for improved standards of living, only to be dismissed as if we were all being sold 'a ulloh' or as the Americans say, 'a bag of goods'.
It must be emphasised that our efforts towards economic empowerment are motivated by current serious economic constraints. Hurricane damage over the last four years has devastated the main banana-growing parishes, culminating in the recent withdrawal of the Jamaica Producers Group's export thrust. This decision, coupled with the loss of other protected markets via the Economic Partnership Agreement, which the Jamaican Government has signed with the European Community, will have a deleterious effect on Jamaica's present and future export earnings.
Remittance earnings
The ongoing and worsening global economic and financial crisis and its attendant effect on our standard of living needs no further emphasis. Similarly, the very recent fallout from the various alternative investment schemes, coupled with the potential devastating effect of reduced remittance earnings, do not augur well for Jamaica's current and medium-term economic well-being.
These aspects should have encouraged an urgent approach to help correct the anticipated fiscal and economic woes. Dramatic increased agricultural production to reduce import dependency and improve export earnings is the foremost way out of economic doom for Jamaica. Instead, bureaucratic lethargy, an indifferent political approach that seems to have no focused coordinated leadership, supported by the conjuring approach of the EU, will no doubt help to keep us where we are headed: on our knees.
Julian 'Jingles' Reynolds is CEO of Anything From Jamaica Ltd & Spring Garden Pre-Cooperative, Portland. Donald Duncanson, CEO of St Mary Processors Ltd, Martin Afflick of Allied Research Associates & Springfield Pre-Cooperative, St Thomas and Leroy Cooke of the Woodside Community Development Action Group, St Mary also contributed to this article.