|
As a child I would beg my Mother to sing that old song,
I thought there was nothing funnier! But I'm not laughing now. When was
the last time anyone here enjoyed a banana? Or a paw-paw? Or a
mango?
For those of you outside of the Caribbean, an
explanation is called for. You see, banana trees are top heavy: wide
leaves & shallow roots; in other words, they fall over when a wind
blows or the ground gets saturated. And banana trees take nine months to
harvest. So, no bananas.
In fact one of our biggest banana chip factories almost
went out of business. Red tape designed to protect our agriculture
prevented them from importing bananas to make chips with. But, as of two
weeks ago they were back in the shops & I actually saw green bananas
for sale last week! Someday soon they'll be back. Tomatoes came back at
Christmas & now they're here in abundance. J$25 (US40c) per pound. A
far cry from the $100 each in October! So bananas will be back, and
paw-paws. The mango trees that survived are bearing but mostly blighted,
worm-infested fruit. I have yet to hear of an avocado or breadfruit
tree which survived. Those are twenty, thirty foot trees; how long
'til they bear again?
So let's think about a nice Sunday breakfast of ackee
& saltfish. Ackee trees suffered, ditto breadfruit. Yam & bammy:
well yams & cassava grow underground, but didn't St Elizabeth get
flooded...twice? (Charley hit that part of the Island too). You can't have
ackee & saltfish without pear but avocado trees are extremely brittle,
they were the first to break apart. So that leaves the saltfish which,
luckily, is imported from Nova Scotia. Hang on! Didn't Ivan finally
end up in Canada?
When there's a hurricane, your immediate thought is
your safety & whether your home will survive the blow. Once it's past
you then make sure your family & friends are OK, then you start
waiting for the utilities to come back up. It's not often you think of
long-term effects. And, after all, the last hurricane to hit Jamaica was
16 years ago, you don't really remember everything.
Yes, we have no bananas but we are diverse, we're not
relying on bananas to earn foreign exchange. What about the dozens of
small islands which do? A lot of those islands are very small &
rely only on bananas or other agricultural crops to earn an income. Don't
count Cayman, they grow money. But Cayman probably suffered worse than
anywhere else. The island is flat & the storm surge covered a great
deal of it. Many people there can't find the remains of their homes. It
was so bad in fact that one of Jamaica's largest & most solid
insurance companies might well go under as all of their Caymanian clients
have made virtually 100% claims! How can any company foresee the
likelihood of that.
We also have bauxite & that's just dirt so that
didn't suffer. But guess what? The ships sat in port for months. Most of
the bauxite shipped from here ends up at Texas's gulf ports which, you
guessed it, Ivan did a number on too!
We also process information but our digiports
were up & running fairly quickly. The storm surge that washed over
Cayman was so powerful that it actually tore up fibre-optic cables from
the seabed!
There's rum! Most of the sugarcane survived, the rains
affected the sugar content of some plantations but others survived. Coffee
survived too. Coffee is an underplanting, so while the trees, like
bananas, sheltering them went down, most of the coffee bushes survived.
The Coffee Board paid out claims remarkably fast for a Government entity
so even the crops that suffered were replanted quickly.
And what about that crop for which this site is named,
Allspice? Well allspice berries grow on trees 15 to 25 ft tall. The
branches are not particularly brittle & the berries mature about now.
They are for the most part fine & Jamaica produces more that the world
demands anyway.
Betty S
12th March, 2005
Previous Columns
|
