Trouble on the Horizon

With the downturn in the US economy and the concomitant effects on Jamaican/Caribbean life, John Maxwell offers a few solutions to the crisis.

clipped from www.jamaicaobserver.com We need to start NOW distributing seeds and slips - peas, beans, corn, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, sweet peppers, carrots, coco, tannia, dasheen, yampi, and other easily grown backyard crops with high nutritional value. We will need to persuade large landowners, in their own survival interest, to disgorge some of the enormous acreages which they don't use and don't need. Right off the bat the government needs to ban all conversion of farmland into non-farm uses and, as the British did in the Second World War, require all landowners to devote at least 10 per cent of their land to food production. This will guarantee more food, increased employment and reduced praedial larceny.