Gareth Manning, Gleaner Writer

The old Goodyear tyre factory in St Thomas, seen in this 2005 photograph. The factory closed its doors in 1997. - File

While it is not the poorest parish, St Thomas it appears, has more residents living in squalor than any other parish in Jamaica.

This is based on the Planning Institute of Jamaica's (PIOJ) map of Unsatisfied Basic Needs released recently, which indicates that there are more communities in this parish where basic needs such as water, electricity, housing and water closets are not being met.

This might appear strange as its historical capital, Morant Bay, is only a mere 45 kilometres from the urbanised hub of the Kingston Metropolitan Region (KMR), yet many of its residents are living without access to basic needs. This is while much of its water resources supply the KMR.

Poorest community

The presence of poverty in St Thomas appears to be a shift from the early '90s when Clarendon led the way with the island's poorest communities. The last poverty map, produced in 1996 and based on the 1991 census, showed Clarendon with 18 of the poorest communities followed by St Mary and St Elizabeth. However, the island's poorest community, Ginger House, was located in Portland.

St Thomas was once a thriving banana-growing parish and is still a producer of sugar, being home to the St Thomas Sugar Company in Duckenfield in the east, one of the five owned by the Sugar Company of Jamaica. That however, like many of the Government-owned sugar companies, has scaled down employment over the years.

Manufacturing was also prominent in St Thomas and created employment for a number of parishioners. There was the Goodyear tyre factory which closed its doors in 1997. There was also some apparel companies which closed their doors or scaled down their facilities significantly, leaving many unemployed.

"It's almost as if there is a hex on us," said Sandra Kenton-Fraser, a former executive director of Upliftment Jamaica, a group that was formed to tackle the social and economic challenges that faced the parish in the late 1990s.

"It has been underdeveloped for as long as I have known it and I don't see anything being done about it in a systematic manner," she said, though there are several community and church groups who have voiced an interest in curtailing the parish's decay.

Serious brain drain

She has been a resident of the parish since age six when she moved there with her parents and, since those days, the sore has continued to fester.

"We have all our young adults who educate themselves and then they stay away. So we have a serious brain drain," she added. "There is nothing to keep anybody here, there are no factories anymore."

And while there are skills training centres such as HEART, people living in communities in the hinterlands, who are worst affected by poverty and unemployment, cannot access the facilities to improve their quality of life.

"They've heard of HEART Trust, they might want to come down and access the facility, but the bus fare is as if they are going to Mandeville," she said. "And then when they do manage to get these skills, there is no employment," she added.

The parish, which was once doing well in agriculture, also has a lot of land going to waste she said.

"There is a lot of land with the potential agro-industry, but everything seems to go somewhere else. So even agriculture business, with all this land available, there is still nothing happening," she said.

gareth.manning@gleanerjm.com