The Editor, Sir:

In a time of perennial, crippling debt burden brought on by an escalating energy bill now exacerbated by an alarming increase in the international food cost, we must take a second look at self-reliance in relation to food production in our very fertile island. We could start with an experimental study at one of our esteemed tertiary institutions.

We have been taught that self-reliance in these Third World countries is a mere fable, mostly by an hegemonic school of thought influenced by the so-called First World, but we in Jamaica, being a very creative 'tun yu hand and make fashion' population, should start to look at producing flour on a large scale and in a systematic way with our own tropical products, eg. breadfruit and, or, casssava, as one aspect of food self-suffiency. Consider what could be achieved with one square mile of systematic breadfruit tree cultivation, produced in the same way as they do apples in North America or, adopt a similarly ingenious way of producing cassava to be processed as our own brand of flour.

If we continue to depend on the North for every kind of production, including food, we are doomed and locked into a future of hegemonic dependency, which will only allow us enough to survive in the best case scenario.

I am, etc.,

A. McLEAN

altimc@yahoo.com

Bloomfield, Connecticut

Via Go-Jamaica