Martin Henry
SOMEONE NEEDS to speak up for squashed tomato farmers when the price of their commodity crashes. If there is a most perishable farm commodity, tomato has to be it. The fruit turned vegetable is at the mercy of the market when it nuff. Sell it for what you can get - even for less than it cost to produce - or lose all.
Hurricanes are huffing up longings for price regulation if not outright control. The Government-based Consumer Affairs Commission is in a tizzy that with an approaching hurricane the price of candles jumped from an average of $66.20 per eight-pack to $150. And yet many willing purchasers couldn't find a single candle to buy once the rush to stock up on hurricane supplies got up and running.
After Hurricane Ivan you couldn't get a single tomato to buy anywhere. Farmers and importers saw a big time opportunity in this unmet demand. Naturally, the first fruits on the market fetched top prices. It wasn't that it necessarily cost more to produce and market tomato. Although it could be. Because smart labour, even at the level of manual work which may be done by illiterate workers who can't spell tomato much more economics, will sense that the tomato market is booming for growers and they can make a better money for their labour. But tomato price went up fundamentally because tomatoes were scarce and demand was high and there were willing buyers and sellers with not a CAC 'pryce inspector' in sight.
With good money running on tomatoes, production expanded. So there are more tomatoes. A whole heap more. And tomatoes rot before you can say Jack Robinson. So prices tumble. Eager farmers sustain losses. And not a word out of Minister of Agriculture Roger Clarke, or from JAS President Norman Grant, the farmers' champions, that the price of tomato must NOT be allowed to fall below some basic minimum which will allow Farmer Brown to still mek a money.
While you are contemplating how ridiculous it is to stop tomato prices from falling [to the benefit of consumers and the 'ruin' of farmers], consider as well some interesting governmental actions which have been taken to keep prices up. The old colonial British Government at one time, for example, to assist its home wool industry ordered by law that everybody who died in the colonies should be buried in woollen garments. Serious.
Jamaican tomato farmers could adopt the strategy of creative destruction for supply control which has been honed by their First World counterparts to keep prices up. Smash tomatoes. But they would need considerable assistance to cartelise for this course of action - assistance which only a powerful organisation like the JAS, or the Government, could provide.
In a free exchange market of individual players creative destruction, or indeed any other kind of price manipulation, is difficult to organise. Indeed, the moment price control is organised we no longer have a market of free exchange. What we will have is a distorted 'soviet' market in which supply and demand have no sensible mechanism of adjusting to each other.
While his Minister of Commerce is busy monitoring the natural price fluctuations of 'hurricane supplies' which match supply to demand, and his Minister of Agriculture remains mum on the equally natural fluctuation of farm produce prices when left undisturbed, the Honourable Prime Minister is preparing for the forced evacuation of people from harm's way when a disaster is imminent. [The JIS Bulletin in Monday's Gleaner says when the disaster is 'eminent', perhaps referring to a category five hurricane like Ivan and not a little wishy washy storm like Emily.]
"There must be the power to compel those citizens to remove until the danger is over. We have to bring that law to Parliament," the prime minister told the House in between hurricanes. He spoke with the usual full assurance of the passage of the law with a large Government majority under the Party Whip.
But while good is intended, such a law blows up with hurricane force concerns about individual rights and freedoms vs. the power and responsibilities of the Government, increasingly paternalistic everywhere. The people who refuse to voluntarily evacuate are not just stupid and stubborn. The Government wanting to forcefully evacuate them 'for their own good' is not just wise and benevolent.
The practical concerns of security of property left behind, of shelter conditions, and so on, are very real. But these should not be allowed to overshadow the far weightier matters of the rights and freedoms of the citizen vs. the power of the state, a power perpetually tending to autocracy and which must be carefully watched and restrained.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
