THIS, ON the face of, is turning out to be a monumental piece of incompetence. And very, very expensive to discover, to boot.
It took a half a decade and the spending of $1.3 billion for Jamaican scientists to discover that they were importing the wrong flies all along. So screw worm infestation is still with us and no one is sure when it will be eradicated.
Worse yet, the people in charge of the project appear not to know the real extent of the problem, except for some fuzzy notion that it may be epidemic in proportion, and that a quarter-century-old study is lying around somewhere, and that it has some data.
Those, stripped of the overburden, are the essential facts that emerged from The Sunday Gleaner's report a week ago. Indeed, but for the violence done to taxpayers and the broader consequences of such waste, we might have been tempted to find the whole episode funny.
Screw worms are the larvae of flies which lay their eggs in the sores of animals which, when they hatch, burrow themselves into, and eat away at, the wounds. The infestation can be fatal and is often costly for farmers.
At the end of the last decade Jamaica decided that it would do something about the problem and got international financing for a project to eradicate the screw worm. It would import sterile flies and release them here to mate with local flies. Over time, the screw worm population would be increasingly infertile and, being unable to breed, would eventually die out.
That was the theory. But it presupposed that the strain introduced into the local population would not only be infertile but would actually mate with the locals.
By 2001 we should have been home and dry. Except that the date kept being extended and that the initial bill of $324 million for the project had, by 2005, ballooned to $1.3 billion. The Auditor General, Mr. Adrian Strachan, could get no clear explanation for this and there were no data to tell what had gone wrong.
"In the absence of baseline data and clear means of measuring accomplishments through a reliable methodology, the reports and conclusions of the process of the project are open to question," Mr Strachan complained in one of his reports. We agree.
It has now emerged, if not yet widely acknowledged, that the flies that Jamaica was importing from Mexico were too small. The Jamaica flies refused to mate with the runts.
The authorities discovered this only last year. Which seems to beg the question of what were those in charge of the project doing all along. Where was the evaluation and analysis? There was, it appears, the absence of basic scientific work, as was highlighted by Mr. Strachan.
It would seem to us that those responsible should be made to account for this fiasco, if they still have jobs.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
