Where We Stand on Wheat Substitution

We welcome the news that the government intends to launch a wheat flour substitution programme in Jamaica. Our movement has always been concerned with food security and food sovereignty, among other things.

In April 2020, close to the time that Jamaica started to feel serious impacts of the pandemic, we had published a document with recommendations for the government. This document included a section on Agriculture where we warned about how food security would be impacted by locust swarms and the breakdown of global supply chains.

Before the escalations in Ukraine in 2022, and even before COVID-19, locust swarms were threatening the food supply of multiple large countries. This would lessen some countries’ abilities to supply the global market, and would increase some countries’ demands for imports. Demand was going up and supply was going down, at the same time, on the global market. To offset a crisis, as wheat prices skyrocketed for a short time, some countries considered releasing their emergency grain reserves.

COVID-19 just added to an already looming crisis with the breakdown of supply chains. A prominent neoliberal economist in Jamaica had to eat his words just 2 years after insisting that we could permanently rely on global supply chains therefore food security and food sovereignty are not real issues. Having been misled by neoliberals and having been dependent on imports for so long, we had been left with little room to navigate emerging realities.

Our Communal Production Project

Having been passionate about food security before this, and having witnessed how Venezuelan communities navigated their own internal crises after being locked off from trade by the US, we conceptualised an ambitious project to promote local food production. We began conceptualising this towards the end of May 2020, and circulated a document within the organisation in August 2020.

Before the sanctions against Venezuela, we had operated a food garden at a school that the Venezuelan government used to operate in Jamaica. The sanctions prevented the government from being able to pay rent for the property, so they were evicted and we lost access to the property as a result. The school offered free classes in music, dancing, and Spanish to people of all age groups; it was an ideal site for a test run for a productive community food garden in an urban area.

In 2020, we wanted the new food project to go beyond gardening in a way that produced raw food; even if we managed to get a productive urban farm, we believed it should have an agro-processing component to preserve the value of whatever is produced; this was largely inspired by the communes in Venezuela.

We came up with different models for how this could work in a community to be inclusive of households that were not a part of the movement. We worked out a system where different persons could contribute things to a process and then they would all share the output. For example, we could produce breadfruit flour from breadfruit, packaging, energy, and labour; the breadfruit flour would be distributed according to what persons contributed (they would know the value of their contribution beforehand, and have an idea of what they would expect to get after making their contributions).

The pandemic made it difficult to work on this project, despite being the catalysing factor that led to its birth. The most difficult hurdle has been the construction of a dehydrator, but we have no regrets about our decision to build one to our specifications instead of buying one. The reason that this had been a hurdle for many months was that we had to navigate curfews and gathering limits. Now that things are ‘opening up’ again, we have been able to make more progress.

The inputs for the project have not been cheap, but they have not fallen on any single person or even a handful of persons. Different persons in the movement have contributed to the project financially, allowing the expense and sense of risk to be more spread among us. Still, it would have been easier if we collectively had more capital.

We have also struggled with a strained executive. Some executive positions are still vacant, and some members of the executive are stretched thin to cover different responsibilities. We are an organisation that is based on a voluntary association of people, not an NGO funded by elite locals and foreign governments. It was only some time after our last Party Congress in November 2021 that we were able to find someone whose main responsibility was managing this project. All the work we do in the movement is with our free time.

National Policy

We do not believe that the scale of our efforts would have had a national impact, but hopefully it would be a project that could be expanded. Beyond our project, we have been interested in food security as a matter of national policy. We felt that the government should have been doing more to incentivise or even kickstart some large-scale agro-processing.

In the aforementioned document that was circulated internally, we had said:

Among the most common starches consumed in Jamaica are wheat and rice, 2 things that we depend heavily on imports for. Households also consume oats, another thing we depend heavily on imports for. We could very well be using locally-produced crops to make flour and porridge, and households do indeed make banana bread, potato pudding, plantain porridge, and so on, but it is easier for a household to buy consumer goods to make these things than if they make them from scratch all the time.

The national bourgeoisie has been slow to develop the agro-processing sector to guarantee a market for a wide range of what farmers produce. As a result, most consumers end up buying imported goods, causing money to constantly bleed from the country as we have a massive trade deficit. As we do not have state power, we can’t do anything about this problem on a national level, policy-wise. The 2 major parties would never do what our movement would want to be done if we had state power, because they naively continue to trust in the ability of the anarchic market dynamics and the private sector to eventually fix the problem.

With neoliberalism and free trade, a Capitalist can make money more easily by importing things for retail, or even importing things for processing and manufacturing rather than supporting our local farmers. The national bourgeoisie has, to some extent, supported our farmers; we are not trying to discount where this has happened or how some farmers benefit, but it has been slow and we still have an underdeveloped agriculture sector alongside an import-dependent manufacturing sector and consumer base. We are compelled to do something about this, even if on a small scale.

Leading up to the general parliamentary elections in September 2020, we published a document outlining our positions on different national matters. The section on food security said:

Food security continues to be an issue in Jamaica. The government takes it for granted that we will always have trade-dependent ‘supply lines’ open. By being dependent on trade to satisfy our food needs, we make ourselves vulnerable to disruption of trade and supply lines.

We need to produce enough food to feed our people, or at least reduce the percentage of our food that needs to be satisfied by imports. This does not mean that people would or should eat only locally, but rather that there will be enough food locally-available if trade is interrupted by any national or international crisis.

One major hindrance to the agriculture sector is the lack of capital available to farmers. Many small farmers find it difficult to access loans or financing for improving or expanding their operations to make them more efficient.

There has also been a lack of investment in agro-processing. This is not to say that absolutely no agro-processing takes place, but there is much more room to do more. Often, the surplus of one time of crop will lead to low prices or even spoilage, which can be disastrous for farmers as they desperately try to sell off their goods and recoup whatever they spent on a production cycle. If we had more agro-processing, there would be more security for farmers in terms of having a market or entity to sell to. Some crops that spoil in short amounts of time could be processed into goods that last longer on shelves in retail or in the cupboards of consumers’ homes

The Future

We are excited for what this new programme may mean for the country. We had told Floyd Green, the former Minister of Agriculture, about our project in its early days of development. Our interactions with Pearnel Charles Jr., who is currently in the ministry, have been cordial in the past; we hope to be able to engage him.

One of our biggest criticisms of this government has been its foreign policy; we believe it is too subservient to Western powers like the US and UK. This cooperation with Cuba, on a matter of real sovereignty for both countries, brings some hope to us about the future of both countries.