Editorial | Provide clarity on Innswood farmland

In the normal scheme of things, Michael Lee-Chin, like any other entrepreneur, should be entitled to deploy his assets as he sees fit to produce the maximum return.

Yet, this newspaper is uneasy not so much by the reported intention of Mr Lee-Chin’s Portland Holdings to chuck in its development of, by Jamaican standards, a mega farm, at the Innswood Estate in St Catherine, but of the plan to use the more than 1,000 acres of land for real estate development. Apparently, Portland has already applied for a change of use permit for the property.

Both Portland and the Government owe Jamaica a clear explanation of the issue, including how the latest proposal fits within the administration’s land use policy, if it has one, and its strategy for food security. The Government should at the same time, provide an up-date on the status of its development of a national spatial plan.

Innswood used to be a sprawling sugar estate on Jamaica’s southern plain, which has fallen largely into disuse in recent decades with the collapse of the island’s sugar industry. Indeed, large swathes of the estate’s arable land have already been turned into residential complexes. Against that backdrop, even a super large one, would not, on the face of it, be such a big deal.

ACCELERATED LOSS

Except that in recent years, more Jamaicans, including this newspaper, have become increasingly aware of the accelerated loss of the island’s limited land to real-estate development, even as global warming and climate change pose grave threats to agriculture and food security.

Indeed, a few years ago, when such issues might have mattered more to him – before his appeasement on the plan for the city on the Bernard Lodge estate – Lenworth Fulton, the president of the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS), pointed out that of the 37 per cent of Jamaica deemed arable, by the mid-2000s only 19.5 per cent was still possibly available for agriculture. Much of the diminution has happened over the last half-century with the decline of estate farming and the growth of suburban developments.

So, it appeared an exciting prospect when over two years ago it was announced that Mr Lee-Chin, the billionaire financial entrepreneur – his holdings include NCB Financial Group and Guardian Holdings – had, through Portland, acquired the Innswood land for a modern farm that would employ the latest Israeli agricultural technology and management talent.

The then agriculture minister, Audley Shaw, announced that Mr Lee-Chin’s farm would have mango and soursop orchards, cantaloupes, melons, as well as short- and long-term crops. An excited Mr Shaw, in a speech to students, used the project as an example of an initiative that should entice them to careers in agriculture.

Some people also saw in the Portland Holdings’ scheme a rebuke of sorts of the Government’s ultimately scaled-back plan for the 17,000-home city on approximately 2,370 acres of Jamaica’s “most fertile ... A1 soil”. Conceivably, the development of Innswood for real estate would be an even larger project. Moreover, it would be a psychological blow for people who were stirred at the prospect of a modern, state-of-the-art agriculture venture in Jamaica.

RAISES QUESTIONS

If, indeed, the original idea is dead, or has badly faltered, it raises several questions, such as the basis on which the land was sold/divested, including the price sale (in the context of a farming enterprise) and the obligation placed on the purchaser, and what would happen should it not execute the undertaking. There would, of course, be the matter of a company’s due diligence – an internal matter that is unlikely to be publicly pronounced upon.

There is also that issue of why we were, and remain, opposed to the Bernard Lodge city. When arable land is put into large-scale real estate development, it is permanently lost to agriculture. That is a matter not to be taken lightly.

The science suggests that with a hotter planet and climate change, global agricultural yields could decline by up to a third. Crudely put, this could translate to requiring 33 per cent more land to produce the same volume of food, which could have an impact on global food security. The food inflation in the face of the global supply chain disruptions, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated by the Russia-Ukraine war, underlines the potential for crisis.

Jamaica, therefore, has a responsibility to be very careful with what it does with its best agricultural land, even when it is in long-term fallow. We cannot, in the future, be as cavalier with its use as we have been in the past.