I took a drive to the countryside the other day and was struck dumb by the spectacle of devastation stretching from Keys to Christchurch on one side of the island. As I drove from one village to the next, the landscape appeared blackened and sparse from cane fires which obviously were methodically lighted.
As I journeyed through the villages and observed the unwholesome sight of acres upon acres of burnt out land, I wondered fleetingly what the tourist guides would tell their charges about this land.
It was not about the tourists that I was worried. It was about the reputation of my country which greets its visitors around our thirty-mile main road with a picture of ecological destruction the likes of which has not been seen in St. Kitts since 1948 during the long strike.
One villager explained that the canefields were burnt down by Rasta men who rival each other over ganja fields which they have implanted into the abandoned canefields. Another villager suggested that it is the Government burning down the fields to destroy the ganja trees that the Rastas have cultivated.
Another remarked that the real cause of the fires is the determination of the authorities to put an end to the practice of some young squatters who have built shacks in the canefields and set up residence in them.
Yet another more far-fetched theory is that some aggrieved people from one side of the political divide have decided to vent their political grievances by systematically setting fire to the canefields.
I don’t know which one of these explanations is credible enough for me to accept because my critical question in answer to these speculations is: What are the canefields doing there in the first place for Rasta men to plant ganja in, for them to build shacks in or for alleged political terrorists to burn?
The St. Kitts sugar industry ended two years ago. After four hundred years of exploitation by a succession of slave masters operations ceased, the management collapsed and the land was supposed to be delivered from the curse of the sugar industry.
After preparing to die since 1948 the industry, having survived artificially by several infusions of ill-advised loans and foreign donations, suddenly collapsed although everybody knew that its date with destiny had passed long ago.
Yet although the sugar industry died, its assets shared up and its business wound up, the sugarcane fields which were the reason for the industry’s existence still stand after two precious years and continue to defile the ground and remind our citizens of their terrible past.
I don’t know who is to blame for this monstrous fiasco, but I have no doubt at all that something very foolish, very inept transpired over the past two years to keep the canefields sustained two years after sugar cane was no longer a viable or wanted product.
Even the most subjective view of the situation must conclude that when a sugar industry has ceased to exist the lands should be immediately freed from sugar cane and it was because this simple idea did not occur to the people who closed the industry why the island’s main road is a picture of devastation and destruction.
I wonder why it did not occur to the transition team to root up the sugar cane and plough up the land for food cultivation. This would have been such a simple and logical outcome of the closure of the industry, that it is hard to understand why none of the highly paid members of the transition team did not suggest it.
I am sure that had anyone of these highly qualified and high profile people thought of it the rest of the team would have taken up the idea and presented it to the Government for implementation.
And it could have been done without costing the Government anything much. All they had to do was give the villagers permission to cultivate the land and grow food to supply the local market.
And don’t give me that comment about the villagers not interested in cultivating the soil. A few years ago when I lived in Tabernacle Village the management of the sugar industry allocated some acres of land to the villagers to cultivate. What an activity.
I remember Bobo Smith, a tractor driver, planting up a field of nuts somewhere in the region of Estridge Road. Some people planted potatoes and it was a delight to see villagers finding the time to engage in planting and providing vegetables, nuts, beans and peas for their fellow villagers to cook.
Of course some people won’t take on that assignment. Farming is hard work and attracts only hard working people and whereas the majority of the people in every village have become too lazy, too sophisticated or too preoccupied otherwise to dirty their hands with the soil, there will always be a few in every village who could make plants grow and who could make money from the land.
What if the transition team had given the land to the villagers to plant food two years ago? Can anyone imagine how much peanuts, sweet potatoes, onions, pumpkins, watermelons would have flooded our market over the last two years?
There would have been endless herbs and thyme to season our meats and fish and to avoid the use of imported seasoning.
There would have been an abundance of local food. Such an abundance that the price of local vegetables would have dropped and the farmers would still have made a lot of money from the large volume of their sales.
When last have we seen fresh black eye peas on the market? Have black-eyes grown unpopular? I remember a time when people used to cook black eye pea soup and the aura of the peas combined with the herbs and thyme used to envelope the neighbourhood. Right now I long for some black eye soup and black-eye in rice.
Can anybody of my generation remember the delicious black-eye soup with sweet potato, breadfruit and dumplings?
How I long for the fresh pigeon peas in rice or soup.
The shelling used to be a problem especially when the peas had worms but when I lived in Barbados in the 1960s I used to get my pigeon peas shelled from the vendors in the public market.
It is mind blowing to imagine what St. Kitts would have experienced in the past two years if the sugar lands had been cultivated even temporarily into food production sites.
Watch pon pineapple, and irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, yam and tannias, cabbage and tomato of all varieties. Me arm!
Instead we kept the land idly and now it stares at us black, empty and pathetic.
Well, it’s better late than never, if we would acquire wisdom for the monstrous stupidity, even now the land could be ploughed and until some better use could be found for this rich soil, the villagers could have it to feed our nation.
