Peter Espeut COMMITMENT TO the environment is more than a obligation to conserve natural resources (e.g. forests, wetlands and coral reefs) and wildlife (e.g. the iguana, marine turtles and manatees), although it would be nice to have at least that. Environmentalism must penetrate our thought processes and value judgments. In anticipation of Environmental Awareness Week coming up I thought I would share some modern thinking so that you can judge how well Jamaica is really doing in the environmental sphere.
Take for example, land valuation and taxation. Agricultural land is taxed at a low rate because it is in production; idle agricultural land is taxed at a relatively high rate because it is not being used near to its full potential. This is a positive incentive favouring real agriculture. But land in its natural condition e.g. natural forest and wilderness performing its functions at full potential (e.g. as a watershed trapping rainfall, carbon sequestration, and functioning as a habitat for wildlife) is taxed at the same rate as idle agricultural land. This is a serious disincentive to environmental conservation, and a positive incentive to environmental destruction and degradation. Persons owning natural forest and wilderness will be encouraged to chop down their forests and go into some sort of agriculture, to earn a tax break, or to sell the forest to someone who will do likewise.
It is this sort of taxation policy which has led to Jamaica being ranked as having the highest rate of deforestation in the world! Environmental thinking would begin with making a distinction between idle agricultural land and wilderness; the former would be punitively taxed as a disincentive, while the latter would attract a tax break at least at the same level as agricultural land in production, as an incentive to keep and conserve natural areas to perform their natural functions. The fundamental problem is that services provided by the natural environment to the national economy are either undervalued or not accounted for at all!
Take for example water. The forests of Jamaica (e.g. the Blue and John Crow Mountains, the Don Figueroa Mountains) trap and filter millions of gallons of rainwater so that the National Water Commission and the National Irrigation Commission can sell it for domestic or agricultural purposes; yet the NWC and the NIC get the water free, and contribute nothing towards conservation of the forests on which their business depends. The environment is subsidising the economy, and we are paying less for the water than it really costs to produce. Failure to include the value of forest services in the equation means that ultimately the forests will disappear under disincentives and the lack of conservation efforts, and water produced will decrease over time (already happening).
One of the many environmental scandals not usually before the public eye is that regulations enabling the Watershed Protection Act to function have never been promulgated, and so our national watersheds do not receive any protection from this Act. A recipe for a national water crisis! Wetlands, especially mangroves at the river mouths, perform the extremely important function of removing nutrient pollution from river water before it damages our dwindling coral reefs (I refer to domestic sewage and fertiliser runoff from agricultural areas upstream).
The fact that tourism and fishing benefit from this is not accounted for. Both mangroves and coral reefs provide the valuable service of slowing down high-energy waves approaching our shores, reducing coastal
erosion and storm damage to coastal buildings, roads and other infrastructure. Indeed, much of the damage to our coastal infrastructure occurs in areas where coral reefs and mangroves have been destroyed. The savings to the economy (including to the insurance industry) from having healthy mangrove wetlands and coral reefs is totally ignored and neglected. Indeed, we call mangrove wetlands swamps and seek to drain and fill them in at the earliest opportunity without regard to the important environmental services they provide.
There is no Jamaican law that protects wetlands or coral reefs. A little bit of environmental thinking would assign real economic value to important ecosystems like wetlands and coral reefs and forests, which would lead to effective legislation and enforcement. Those who benefit would then be required to contribute to the cost of their conservation.
Increased carbon dioxide levels in the air cause the greenhouse effect, global warming and sea level rise, deadly to a small tourism-dependent island like Jamaica. The generation of electricity and the operation of motor vehicles are the main villains, but neither are required to be efficient nor penalised for inefficiency. The hero is again forests, which remove carbon dioxide from the air, sequester the carbon into wood and release oxygen for us animals to breathe. This is another case where government policy favours the villains, and the hero suffers from disincentives and neglect.
Here again, quite unheralded, the natural environment subsidises the national economy. A little bit of environmental thinking would shift the incentives from motor vehicles and industry to the natural forests, and introduce disincentives to pollution and deforestation. It is not just the environment which subsidises the Jamaican economy. The Jamaican rural poor are forced to bear increased costs due to the pollution of their environment by industry and agriculture. Acid rain, fish kills, respiratory and skin disorders, and the lack of potable water are but a few of the ills inflicted on the rural poor by private companies who are not required to pay the full cost of their production activities.
The full cost of bauxite/alumina production includes the cost of dealing with caustic emissions into water and air; the full cost of sugar, molasses and rum production includes the cost of proper disposal of dunder. Neither industry has been required to pay the full cost of its production; rather, the environment and the surrounding rural folk have been forced to absorb costs associated with air and water pollution: scarcer and more expensive potable water, damage to roofs and clothes, reduced fish populations, and increased medical costs associated with asthma and other respiratory conditions.
Full cost accounting would include environmental services and environmental subsidies, and national policy should require that each sector agriculture, water, industry, tourism should pay the full cost of its activities, and not require either the natural environment or the rural poor to absorb some of their costs.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
