Jamaica Producers Group
Jamaica Observer
In recent days the Jamaica Producers Group has announced that it is finally going to stop growing bananas for export. This announcement, by Jamaica’s largest commercial banana producer, will mean that over four hundred people will lose their jobs. Without effective government intervention, there will be a ripple effect of poverty and hopelessness through families and communities. It will also force the Ministry of Agriculture to examine the feasibility of banana as a viable export crop.
And it is a historic decision. Because the original Jamaica Producers organisation set up in 1925, was all about the export industry. Specifically it proposed to challenge the power of American multinationals like the United Fruit Company. An agricultural co-operative was a daring innovation. The first president was Walter Coke-Kerr, Custos of St James and a leading banana planter and he said of an early meeting “The gathering marked an important step in the industrial history of Jamaica, an attempt that had never been undertaken in its annals”
In 1927 the Jamaica Banana Producers Association emerged; it was an offshoot of the original association. Charlie Johnston was the head. Despite early struggles, the new association was an emphatic success, enriching many big and small farmers in the process. Jamaica’s premiere banana parish was St Mary. Author Ansell Hart has written “St Mary drank more champagne in the Banana days than all the other parishes” By 1937, banana exports reached an all-time high of 360,000 tons, representing more than 50% of the value of the Jamaica’s exports. So, at the time of 1938 Dockworkers strike, Charlie Johnston was a key figure in Jamaica society. By then he was, not only head of the Jamaica Banana Producers Association, but a director of Kingston Wharves Ltd and a leading figure in the islands shipping association. Johnston knew Norman Manley, because he had worked for the association as a lawyer. But he also knew labour leader Alexander Bustamante. This was because Bustamante had worked for Johnston in the shops that he ran before he rose to eminence in the banana industry. In the turmoil of the 1938 strike Manley regarded Johnston as a moderate. Manley wrote in his diary of the time “C.E. Johnston…a tower of strength against force. He sees that all wages must go up. He sees very far”
But Charlie Johnston was probably not able to foresee the long slow decline of the banana industry. The very same American multi-nationals, that the original co-operative had been set up to fight, finally defeated Jamaican farmers through the workings of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The WTO opened up European markets to the much cheaper (but inferior) bananas that American companies produced in South America. This was the death warrant of the banana industry in the Caribbean. In the nineteen eighties Jamaica Producers had already begun a programme of diversification. Today banana production is responsible for a mere five per cent of the group's operations - 80 per cent of their operations are food processing and the remaining 11 per cent comprise freight and shipping. We live in turbulent times. Who would have guessed that, with the recent takeover of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac also insurance company AIG, a right-wing republican American administration would be responsible for the biggest nationalisation of private assets since the rise of the Soviet Union? And who would have guessed that Jamaica Producers would ever abandon exporting bananas? For more information please consult the book When Banana Was King: A Jamacian Banana King in Jim Crow America by Leslie Gordon Goffe which can be found at http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Banana-Was-King-Constantine/dp/9768202238
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