Norman Grindley/ Staff Photographer
The land at St. Jago Farms, adjacent to the Spring Plains property in Clarendon, is overgrown with vegetation. Petulia Clarke, Staff Reporter
The National Investment Bank of Jamaica (NIBJ), which is charged with the responsibility of overseeing the divestment of the failed high-tech Spring Plains/St. Jago properties in Clarendon, is awaiting Cabinet approval to lease them to a group of investors.
NIBJ's Director of Privatisation, Dudley Sackaloo, said on Friday, that the proposed project would involve the growing of vegetables and other crops on sections of Spring Plains and St Jago farms.
Spring Plains, the agricultural showpiece of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Government of the 1980s, which then Prime Minister, Edward Seaga had projected would propel Jamaican agriculture into the 21st century, incurred losses of more than $135 million from the time it opened in 1982 to when closed in 1986.
The hundreds of acres of lands at that time were used as part of a "winter vegetable" project that farmed and exported jumbo jet loads of tomatoes, snow peas and cabbages among other crops. Adjacent to Spring Plains is the St. Jago farms, also owned by the Government and used in the 1980s in a similar farming project.
Leebert Drummond, a former employee at Spring Plains and father of 12, remembered a time when "overtime, double time and everything boomed". On Friday nights the women had to bring clothes for their men to change as work continued well into the night as there were 20-30 containers moving out per day, he said.
"It was a wonderful time, it was 100 per cent good for the community. Anybody who wasn't working then, it was because they didn't want to work," Mr. Drummond told The Sunday Gleaner.
St. Jago today looks like activity there has merely stopped in time, with tractors and buildings rotting and corroded on the spot. There's absolutely no activity on Spring Plains which looks like something that belongs in the pages of history books, with fertile lands sprawling around a structure which was once a gleaming manager's house. Both farms are overgrown with vegetation. One small farmer is now farming sweet pepper and potatoes on a part of the St. Jago land.
"There was every type of tractor you could imagine," Mr. Drummond recalls. "There was the newest equipment, everything, you'd see them on the land and just marvel. We used to farm everything, soya beans, tomato, onions, melon, cucumber, banana and red peas. The local market couldn't even manage the produce, everybody was victorious, honestly."
Spring Plains and St. Jago served as employment grounds for over 800 persons in that area, as well as all across the island.
"Everybody felt it (the collapse). Now a few are into the sugar cane business (Monymusk Estates), but there's only work at reaping time, after that everybody have to sit down and wait till the next year," Mr. Drummond said. "Nothing's going on now; some of us raise cows; I burn coal, but nothing not happening there either, everything crash."
Hopeton Russell, a former supervisor at Spring Plains said that it was mismanagement and corruption that caused its demise.
The farm was run by Eli Tisona, an Israeli, who was in 1998 banned from entering Jamaica and has since been convicted of drug-related and money laundering charges in the United States.
The JLP held that whatever Mr. Tisona may have done for which he was convicted was due to offences committed in the 1990s after he left Jamaica and not during the 1980s when they were in power. In June last year, when asked about possible divestments, the NIBJ said that there had been several proposals and enquiries over the years, and negotiations had been held with some prospective investors in the now idle properties. However, problems were encountered as prospective investors were unable to fund proposed projects. Mr. Russell said that there were always people coming to the farms to look, but so far no activity was visible. The NIBJ also stated that some investors were interested in sections of the property, but Government's policy prefers divestment of the entire property.
Prior to that, in 1997 Cabinet Secretary Dr. Carlton Davis announced that a 20-year lease had been given to Agroways Ltd. for a packaging house, some 156 hectares of agricultural lands and about 78 hectares comprising a mango orchard. Today, the mango orchard is no more. The trees still stand, and Mr. Russell said that when they do bear fruit, the product is reaped by persons in the community and sold.
The NIBJ said that "due to an unexpected misfortune suffered by one of the partners of Agroway, leasing of the property was aborted."
In explaining the deterioration of the property, the NIBJ said that in 1991, the property was leased to a group of foreign/local investors but was terminated prematurely. "Subsequently serious discussions have been held with several potential investors who expressed interest in leasing the property, but to date there has been no success," they said. The office section of the packing house at St. Jago was leased for a period of approximately 15 months during 2000-2001.
"We just want them to do something so we can get some jobs," said Donovan Page, who used to pick and wash mangoes at Spring Plains. People used to always get work, they really need to re-open."
