Building a sustainable economy

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Dear Editor,

With a new government in place there is much discussion about building a sustainable economy for Jamaica. The discussion is long overdue. Jamaica needs a serious long-term plan to establish a complex of integrated operations that provide an indefinitely renewable supply of potential workers with solid technical skills that would enable them to find good jobs with good wages. This would be a proper start for an economy that must absorb a constant flow of newly qualified workers into the labour pool each year. Moreover, such workers should be skilled enough to work anywhere in the world.

Some time ago one of your thoughtful columnists presented an interesting idea to develop the area around Vernam Field in Clarendon as a sophisticated, modern, multi-purpose transportation hub. The idea was, it seems, to integrate sea, land and air transportation networks to serve Jamaica as well as the wider world. There was considerable merit in the proposal.

A new seaport was envisaged with several purposes in mind. One was as a transshipment point for the new supersized Panamax cargo ships that will transit the newly widened Panama Canal. The mega-ships would unload and transfer their enormous unpackaged cargo at the port to smaller, rapid vessels that would then distribute the trade material to destinations along the Atlantic coast. At the same time, a new free zone could be established around the port to assemble and package goods destined for local, regional or international commerce. The port would not be a good service area for the supersized "capesize" bulk carriers and should not be seen as displacing or rivalling Kingston. Rather the new port would complement activities of other Jamaican ports.

The original idea apparently found no traction in Jamaica, but the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, was just in Cuba discussing, among other things, the construction by the Brazilian Development Bank of just such a maritime operation at the port of Mariel on the Cuban north coast west of Havana. The Brazilian company Odebrecht is spending more than US$682 million to modernise the facilities at Mariel. With this already on the drawing board, it is unlikely that the northern Caribbean has room for two such large operations. However, there are several reasons to believe that Jamaica could have been very competitive in bidding for the development of the complex in Clarendon. But with the appointment of a new Jamaican ambassador to Brazil, maybe the possibilities exist for future cooperative ventures with that up-and-coming industrial power.

The other idea in the original proposal was the building of a large, multipurpose airport at Vernam Field. This modern expanded international airport would serve not only to take passengers in and out of Jamaica, but also for connecting travel to other points in the hemisphere and worldwide. It could offer two additional services: first, to serve as a cargo hub connecting both the free trade zone and Panamax port and to be an attractive alternative to Miami and other circum-Caribbean airports for major specialised parcel services such as DHL or FedEx; second, to be a state-of-the-art aeronautical service centre for all types of planes: commercial as well as in civil aviation.

An integral part of the transport plan would be to develop an adequate road and rail network connecting Vernam Field to Kingston, Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Port Antonio. All the plans should be developed with the future in mind. An express train connecting Kingston, Vernam Field and Montego Bay would enable Jamaica to have landing facilities for larger, more modern aircraft than are in service at the moment, and accommodate more passengers than currently can be processed at Kingston, Montego Bay or any of the other Jamaican airports.

Far-sighted planning would require that all the necessary collateral training and services be built around the newly constructed airport and seaport. A modern state-of-the-art training hospital would produce a constant flow of trained physicians with a wide range of specialties that would attract a constant stream of health-seeking tourists who now travel from the Americas to Asia in search of affordable health care. The complex could also be a major centre for the hospitality industry with hotels, restaurants, and ground transportation services. And a technical school or university would train workers for repairing ships and planes. Such an integrated arrangement could begin the type of self-sustaining economic activity that should be appealing to the Jamaican government and the general population.

Of course, no one believes that the government of Jamaica takes its ideas from the newspapers. So it is unlikely that the ideas stated here will fall on fertile ground. Yet it seems worthwhile to mention them in case your paper is read in countries where the political leaders do collect, sift and winnow ideas for advancing the welfare of their states and their peoples.

David Brown

Montego Bay

St James

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Building a sustainable economy