By Lavern Clarke, Staff Reporter .JPG)
Patterson
PRIME MINISTER P.J. Patterson is impressive in an international forum. As chairman of the Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on Trade Negotiations, his interventions on behalf of the Caribbean region are well argued in language that the super traders pay attention to.
He talks the talk.
So two weeks ago in Spain when the European Union hosted Latin America and the Caribbean, his treatise on sustainable development and poverty erosion as imperatives for increased donor assistance was spot on. These, after all, are the very same interests that developed nations are pushing as part of their own agenda in building markets worldwide.
It put Patterson in the light of an enlightened country leader with a care for the environment and the quality of life, and you might have got the impression that Jamaica's policies and programmes are implemented based on a long term vision of maintaining a balance between the activities of man and the resources provided by nature.
But back home there is no escaping the reality.
The Patterson administration, under the misguided course of giving land to the poor, allows a policy of rewarding squatting and uses scarce financial resources to develop infrastructure on hillsides and river banks for illegal settlers.
The monopoly water supply agency is grappling with its own reality that whenever it rains, there is a high probability that its service will be disrupted because of turgidity problems that stem from heavy deposits of top soil and some man-made waste in its raw water sources.
We allow large hotels to be build on our coasts, and a resort like Negril is allowed to grow beyond what common sense says is reasonable for it to sustain its major drawing card - seven miles of white sands.
On the plus side, we correct our sewerage problems, not because our waters were being polluted, but because the international community began noticing and it became a threat to tourism.
We develop measures for poverty, but have no indicators for well-being, and don't even consider it important enough to develop a real policy that speaks to a system of recreational parks and green spaces for community and social interaction.
We fix main roads but ignore the side roads and drains that clog, then dump debris and rocks on the new infrastructure, guaranteeing that both will be washed away when the weather turns nasty.
And every year, when the rains inevitably come we end up with flooded communities, damaged infrastructure, displaced households, dead crops and livestock, and even human fatalities - and a bill that runs into hundreds of millions, even billions to correct the damage.
But why avoid problems when we can patch them with free money? Right!
Perhaps Finance Minister Dr. Omar Davies should invest in a comparative study of what it takes to clean up the mess we create each year, and what it costs to do the developments right and to maintain them.
Count in that cost, the indignity of begging for more donor aid - sorry, co-operation assistance - and weigh it against our refusal to acknowledge that, despite the legislation on the books, sustainable development gets lip service only.
Its truly a pretence when our planners and developers produce environmental plans that are prettily outlined with pictures and drawings, but we still end up with flooded out housing schemes; newly dualised roads cradling ponds of rain water because no proper run-off is built into the designs, a la Trafalgar Road; bridges washed away because their foundations are not built to withstand the storm waters that flow under and over them; parts of our coastlines turning brown with slush and sludge; landslides and mud-caked roads; beaches being eroded; hillsides being denuded, and so on and so forth.
When Patterson argued in Spain that the sustainable trade that developed nations are trying to build must rest on sustainable development in the markets they want to penetrate - his case for Jamaica and the Caribbean would have been far more convincing if he was the type of leader under whose watch superficial safeguards of the environment simply were not tolerated.
