The Poor Does Not Have to be With Us Always

Can We End Poverty in Jamaica?
Basil Waine Kong

I was amused to learn recently that the winners of the US$250,000,000 Powerball lottery were three millionaires (asset managers) in Connecticut. It started me thinking about how and why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I am also thinking of the gentleman who prayed fervently but futilely every day for God to bless him so he could win the lottery. Finally God had to speak directly to the gentleman: “If I am going to help you win the lottery you should at least buy a ticket. I can only help those who help themselves.”

A year ago, a country gentleman told me that his father advised him that going to school was a waste of time and that as long as he could dig a yam hill he would be fine. So, for fifty years, he has been cutting cane and planting his ground on an acre of land he rents---never expecting to own his own land. Not even in his dreams could he see himself owning adequate tools of his trade, a house, a tractor or even a bicycle. I now learn that illiterate persons will no longer be allowed to participate in the Government's overseas farm work program. According to Minister of Labour, Derrick Kellier, persons applying to pick fruit and plant beans in Canada must know how to read, write and do arithmetic. What is the future of the twenty percent of Jamaican citizens who cannot read or write? Do we just blame the victim and move on?

My fervent prayer is for the poor to get richer. But my wise friend and golfing buddy insist the rich have all the luck. I tell him that that the harder I practice and work at my game, the luckier I get. While it is a common occurrence for rich children to turn out to be worthless bums and a few children from poor families become accomplished heroes and stars. In the absence of people with extraordinary talent and discipline, as a rule it doesn’t happen often. Babies of the rich are fed delicious and nutritious meals with silver spoons, exposed to the movers and shakers of society as they grow up, go to the best schools, have access to effective healthcare, get tutors to help them learn how to handle their knife and folk, play a musical instrument and to excel in sports, travel, learn to speak eloquently, dress to impress, have their choice of employment from their extensive network of family connections and then they win the lottery. On the other hand, the poor child face daily struggles to get a plate of food each day in single parent households, crime, may or may not go to school, survive by catering to the rich, sleep on the hand ground with a rock stone for their pillow, hustle to make a living and die ten years before his rich counterpart only because he was born at the wrong address.

Will the poor always be with us? Several countries including several the size of Jamaica (Singapore, Botswana, Bermuda, Kuwait, and Oman) have now wiped out poverty. That’s right---no poor people. Everyone has a floor they can comfortably live with. What do these countries have in common?

Two Harvard professors (Acemoglu and Robinson) did an analysis of two cities and wrote:
“In Nogales, a city cut in half by the Mexican-American border fence. There is no difference in geography between the two halves of Nogales. The weather is the same. The winds are the same, as are the soils. The types of diseases prevalent in the area given its geography and climate are the same, as is the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic background of the residents. By logic, both sides of the city should be identical economically.

And yet they are far from the same.

On one side of the border fence, in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, the median household income is $30,000. A few feet away, it's $10,000. On one side, most of the teenagers are in public high school, and the majority of the adults are high school graduates. On the other side, few of the residents have gone to high school, let alone college. Those in Arizona enjoy relatively good health and Medicare for those over sixty-five, not to mention an efficient road network, electricity, telephone service, and a dependable sewage and public-health system. None of those things are a given across the border. There, the roads are bad, the infant-mortality rate high, electricity and phone service expensive and spotty.”

The key difference is that those on the north side of the border enjoy law and order and dependable government services — they can go about their daily activities and jobs without fear for their life or safety or property rights. On the other side, the inhabitants have institutions that perpetuate crime, graft, and insecurity.”

Jamaica has fourth-highest poverty rate at 43.1 per cent compared with our 23 regional neighbours and according to the IMF over one million Jamaicans live on less than US$2.50 per day. Is it possible for our politicians to accept the fact that what we have been doing is not working and our government and bureaucracy is causing poverty? Can we join together and establish a national mandate to reverse it?

Land Reform in Jamaica

Can Jamaica become a major food exporter?
Basil Waine Kong, Ph.D., JD

If Jamaica is to ever to achieve prosperity, security, freedom from dependence on foreign aid and dominance from abroad, we must seize the opportunity to forge a strategy for ourselves and for future generations where the rule of civil law, not the rule of the jungle governs the conduct of our people. To this end, it is our duty to try novel social and economic experiments that allow Jamaicans to reap economic benefit from the sweat of their labour. One such “experiment” may be to bring our agrarian expertise into full swing by promoting the growth of exportable agricultural products to the world.

An abundance of vacant, fallow land is available in Jamaica and can be used to plant exportable crops and to decrease the amount of food that we buy from other countries. This precedence effectively addresses many of our social and economic ills. The planting and reaping of profitable harvests by putting more land into production with available workforce will decrease the number of Jamaican citizens who are idle in our cities. My grandmother was fund of saying: “Idle hands become the work of the Devil.” This is borne out in the high crime rate that plagues us.

It is in the best interest of Jamaica to implement significant land reform for the purpose of increasing food production and reducing poverty. The purpose of a proposed land reform should be to bring about a more equitable distribution of land ownership and access to land. This can be brought about by changes in laws and regulations as a scheme to increase the acreage under cultivation, increase output, meet the growing shortage of food worldwide and at the same time reduce poverty and crime in Jamaica? A land of abundant rainfall, sunshine, fertile soil, expert cultivators, access to huge markets and relatively cheap labor is ripe for a guided agricultural revolution. I was impressed that as a boy we could just stick a limb from a tree into the ground and it would grow into another tree.

The contrast between rich and poor in Jamaica arises mainly from the mal-distribution of land ownership and the lack of access to land by poor Jamaicans. As a result, many Jamaicans do not have access to land that would promote self employment. So, both land and an able bodied labour force are idle, kept apart by outdated laws, customs and bad tax policy. The land certainly should be taxed (site value rating) but not the improvements made to the land and the products reaped from the land for the 1st year of usage. We need to take the incentive out of keeping land out of production and create a graduated taxation or tariff on production after the immediate needs of the farmer have been considered.

Due to extremely low real estate taxes coupled with the increasing value of land, it is currently profitable for entrepreneurs to buy land, take it out of production, pay very little taxes, and eventually resell the land at a significant gain. Baring capturing the land, current landowners have little incentive to either develop their property or make it available for agricultural production or industrial development. On the other hand, potential farmers do not have access to arable land for cultivation. In their desperation and frustration, many of them move to urban areas, survive under deplorable circumstances or turn to crime to subsidize their livelihoods.
The goals of the proposed program are to:

1. Increase the acreage of land that is used for food productions.
2. Increase the number of Jamaicans willing to be farmers.
3. Provide subsidies to cultivators for seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and farming equipment.
4. Increase food production (Eat what we grow, grow what we eat) and provide an avenue for market access to farmers to sell their produce.
5. Increase food exports (a government body would guarantee the prices of various food items and prepare and package them for export).
6. Promote the production of canning and packaging plants.
7. Reduce unemployment and promote self employment through farming and provide jobs in the packaging sector.
8. Increase home ownership of the land that is used for farming.
9. Reduce crime by employing young men and women who are now idle in the urban areas.
10. Increase the quality of life for unemployed Jamaican workers through employment and financial empowerment.
11. Increase taxes after subsidizing these farmers for three years.

Further, I recommend that we examine existing laws, regulations and customs relating to land ownership and land tenure. Preventive legislation needs to be removed and new incentive based legislation introduced to:
1. Increase taxes on land that is not being used to incentivize landowners to at least rent the land so it can be productive.
2. Take land where taxes are more than three years in arrears.
3. Relocate unemployed citizens from urban ghettos by reallocating them to land that is laying waste and providing adequate housing to incentivize unemployed citizens to relocate; (Food for the Poor has demonstrated that adequate housing can be built on 10 acres of land for less than J$500,000 per unit. How much does it cost to keep a man in prison?)
4. Adjust Real Estate taxes so that existing homesteads are not adversely affected;
5. Monitor recipients of these land grants to make sure these opportunities are not squandered.
6. Favor married couples.

We have before us the opportunity to forge prosperity for ourselves and for future generations of Jamaicans. A key strategy on our war on poverty is to help individuals to own something and have an investment in a lawful society so they will have an investment in protecting the property and interests of their fellow citizens. The true test of our compassion is in the way that we care for our most vulnerable citizens. We can have a true democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. The same law for the lion and the lamb is oppression. In order to treat some people equally, we must treat them differently. This is not a gift or a hand-out; it is an investment in our citizens.

To this end, I recommend that our government form a task force to explore the merits of this proposal immediately. The more we are able to put forth realistic ideas, the more of a chance we have for a true reformation and referendum of the current economic policies that is failing our country and our people. In the words of Franklin Roosevelt: "I see on-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished...The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

This land is our land. Let's put it into production! While I believe that property rights must be carefully safeguarded, I also believe that poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere.

Poverty in Jamaica

I left Jamaica in 1959 at the tender age of 15 years old and after fifty years in the United States, I have returned for my remaining fifteen. I have been a hospital administrator, college professor, lawyer, psychologist and most notably, for the last 21 years, the CEO of the Association of Black Cardiologists living in Atlanta, Georgia.

The selfish part of me returned to Jamaica to enjoy the unparalleled quality of life that is only available on these shores: the pride I feel when our fellow citizens excel, great golf and caddies, old time religion, fabulous restaurants and food, music and dancing, our unique culture, wonderful hospitality, the ocean, sunshine and rain. The unselfish part of me wants to make a difference and leave the island better than I found it in 1943. My sense is, however, that we have gone backwards.

I am simply appalled at the lack of access to the means of productive assets---loss of hope and prospect leading to a loss of the spirit by the bulk of our people and wonder if there is a national imperative to cure poverty. I find it unacceptable that a privileged few continue to accumulate excess goods while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence. The richest 1% owns more wealth than the poorest 90%. Something is terribly wrong when the elite of Jamaica are over-consumers while millions are destitute. This economic order adversely affects everyone. I have not met anyone who is not troubled by the decline in moral standards and our economic challenges. More provision must be made for the material security of all our citizens.

In the United States, I was a Lyndon Johnson democrat. I was drawn to the idea that widespread poverty is un-necessary. If a country is to prosper, every citizen must own something and have a stake in it. Johnson’s war on poverty made it possible for a large disenfranchised segment of the United States population to maintain their own homes, have access to jobs but most importantly to retain their own business through small business loans.

I am in no way proposing that we combat poverty by redistributing past wealth accumulations. Curing poverty can, however, be accomplished through expansion of future ownership and profit sharing opportunities with the less privileged. Technology is the most important opportunity for creating new wealth. Let us develop this potential and share it with the poor.

If we are responsible stewards who are faithful to the mission of enhancing and protecting the well being of all our citizens, we should be investing in all citizens not just some of our citizens. We should be about creating conditions under which we can all prosper. The Jamaica Government must do more to empower our people to develop and enjoy financial independence. Our current policies, presently conceived and executed, appear to achieve the opposite. Every Jamaican citizen is entitled to equal access to institutions, laws, and other “social goods” that will empower every motivated individual to acquire and share in the productive wealth of the country. People are born not only with mouths that need to be fed, but also with hands that can produce, and minds that can create and innovate.

What motivated Lyndon Johnson was realizing that if citizens cannot participate in the wealth of the country through legitimate channels, they will find a way to survive---one way or another. More importantly, wealth creation opportunities for everyone honour our humanity.