I THINK public defender Earl Witter has missed the point about the shutting down of the scrap metal trade. He is concerned that the rights of the scrap metal gatherers, dealers and exporters to earn a living may have been infringed by a stroke of the minister's pen. He does not condone the theft of railway lines, electricity wires, bridge rails, cultural artefacts, house gates and the like (he thinks persons who do this have "a disease of the mind"); his concern is "the honest dealer, gatherer, and honest exporter who plays by the rules ... may have been, by this act of the minister, shafted".
The main issue, Mr Witter, is not the honesty or criminal behaviour of many of the scrap metal operators, but the unsustainability of the scrap metal trade. If unscrupulous persons had not been ripping off public and private property, the industry would have been forced to shut down long ago, because it would have run out of scrap metal to export.
The gathering, compressing and exporting of scrap metal is not a typical business enterprise; it has more in common with fishing than with manufacturing. A manufacturer sources his raw materials on the open market and processes it to produce his product; he can increase production at any time by sourcing more raw materials on the open market, and increasing his staff. A fisherman has to chase down his fish in the open sea; he can only catch them if mother fish lay enough eggs to hatch, and after bigger fish have had their fill; you cannot fish harder to increase fish production beyond a certain point, after which the catch will decline (you will now be catching and killing the mother fish). You cannot catch more fish than are hatched without a decline in fish stocks (overfishing).
(Once the backlog of scrap build-up has been taken off) you cannot export more scrap metal than is generated without cannibalising non-scrap metal. The industry had expanded on the fat of the backlog of scrap build-up and long ago had become unsustainable. It does not have a "right" to exist if there is no more legitimate scrap to export.
What I would encourage Mr Witter to do is to explore a little more the concept of sustainable development. Although most governments have signed United Nations treaties committing their nations to pursue it, and have national policy documents prescribing that government departments must encourage it, few seem to understand it. In their election manifestos political parties will declare their undying support of sustainable development, and then afterwards descend into opportunism and expedience, approving the destruction of wetlands, forests, fragile coral cay ecosystems and the like in the name of progress and (what is definitely unsustainable) "development".
Vandalism, Mr Witter, has forced our present government to take the right decision in this case, in support of sustainable development. Please do not do anything to threaten their one claim to sustainable behaviour.
Capital punishment
You can tell we are fully in the silly season; several voices from within the government are raised in concert calling for the resumption of hanging. When you are in opposition and you call for hanging, you are harassing the government; when you are in government and you call for hanging, who are you harassing? The human rights groups?
It is naked populism!
Opinion polls show that most Jamaicans support capital punishment, and flogging; and the frequency with which our countrymen lynch and chop up goat thieves and homosexuals is a sure sign of where our moral compass lies.
The recent beheadings have led to public outrage, and the latest calls for hangings to resume; I wonder if the perpetrators of the beheadings were identified and caught by a Jamaican mob, whether they would not chop them up and behead them to show their disapproval of the beheadings? What an irony!
If we want to detect and apprehend more murderers, we must first increase the level of education and training within our police force, certainly among the homicide detectives. And we must further increase our investment in forensic science and technology available to our crime fighters.
And the Jamaica Labour Party and the People's National Party must not just disassociate themselves from their gangs with their gunmen and beheaders, but must turn them in, and bring in the guns. There is too much hypocrisy in Jamaican politics.
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and a Roman Catholic deacon.
August 5, 2011
jamaica-gleaner
An International Caribbean Online Log about the news and opinions in the Americas and World. This Caribbean Blog of global reach and appeal is maintained by Bahamian Blogger - Dennis Dames with all readers and subscribers in mind.
