Editorial | Debate alternative to Bernard Lodge city

Around a decade and a half ago, Kingsley Thomas, then the chairman of the National Housing Trust (NHT), spearheaded the purchase by the agency of 15,000 acres of a former hemp plantation near Hayes, Clarendon. The hemp, when it was grown, was raw material for a domestic rope manufacturer.

Mr Thomas, pushing back at critics at the time, insisted that the soil was largely of limestone and unsuited for any other form of agriculture. The land was, therefore, appropriate for a new, purpose - built city he had in mind and whose design was being put to international competition.

Not much has been heard of this project since Kingsley Thomas - celebrated for his big ideas and as the conceptualiser of the Highway 2000 network of toll roads - left the NHT and the Development Bank of Jamaica near the second half of the 2000s. Mr Thomas' proposal, whose working title was New Town, has renewed relevance in the face of Prime Minister Andrew Holness' recent enunciation of his own plan for the development of a town at Bernard Lodge in St Catherine, for which a "master plan" has been completed.

According to Mr Holness, the Bernard Lodge urban community is to have "17,000 housing solutions" into which will be integrated "commercial offices, light industrial operations, and agriculture into a symbiotic relationship ... (that) follows green development concepts and principles".

EXCITING, THOUGHTFUL

The proposed development, as outlined in Parliament, sounds like an exciting and thoughtful development. Except that what the prime minister presented were merely the bones of a complex enterprise, about which there has been little public discussion and excluding many critical elements. Put another way, the process, thus far, lacks transparency.

For instance, Mr Holness did not say how much land is to go to this venture, but a previous failed project had projected up to 275 acres being put under housing. This is important because Bernard Lodge sits in the fertile alluvial plains of St Catherine and represents some of the country's best farmlands, where huge amounts of sugar cane used to be grown. It is also home to a mothballed sugar factory.

Jamaica's sugar industry may be in its death throes, but Bernard Lodge, with some of the best-watered and most irrigable lands, is suitable for many types of crops and a potential major contributor to Mr Holness' declared policy of developing a food-secure Jamaica and substantially slashing our annual food import bill of nearly US$800 million.

STEM REAL-ESTATE ENCROACHMENT

Developing agriculture and having it become, as envisioned by the new portfolio minister, Audley Shaw, a major contributor to GDP growth rates of between five and six per cent per year, won't happen if rapid encroachment of real estate on Jamaica's best farmlands is unabated. Indeed, Bernard Lodge is not the only portion of the rich St Catherine plains earmarked for urban development. A residential-industrial complex has been planned for the Caymanas Estate to facilitate Jamaica's deepened entry into the global logistics matrix.

This newspaper is not opposed to Jamaica's development of new urban communities to take pressure off existing ones or to facilitate new industries, but this ought not to happen on the best agricultural lands, which increasingly appears to be the case. There are swathes of marginal lands around the country in proximity to critical infrastructure, including seaports and airports, where this can happen. Further, with Jamaica's limited resources, the primary focus and policy direction of the Government should be on the redevelopment of the country's badly blighted urban communities and the regularisation of squatter settlements, where up to a third of the population live.

Mr Holness and his ministers must, therefore, immediately bring transparency to the Bernard Lodge project and engage in a full discussion of the alternatives, including Kingsley Thomas' New Town idea.