OUR bodies are not yet unchained. They are stolen from us by ideology, popular media and more frighteningly, by our actual bodily consumption: the food and liquids we consume, and the pharmaceuticals we digest. The hospital and pharmaceutical healthcare bill of our Caribbean Governments will become devastatingly and debilitatingly massive. It will continue to eat up greater and greater proportions of our GDP, our productive pie. Our bodies are being stolen from us, alienated from us, by the vast amount of questionable or addictive food products we consume. Not just the physical food, but the food ideologies, the food concepts: fast food, café smoothies and café shakes, ritualised coffee and chocolaty-based drinks, carbonated drinks, pack-drinks and tin-drinks, health-drinks, energy-drinks, from-concentrate drink, sugar-laced chubby-shaped liquid doses for children.
Supply of goods and services are not, as some classical economists might avow, reliant on demand. Today, it is reliant on the imperatives of a global investor state, on the global marketing budget, the imperatives of imperial control of each molecule of human organic mass. It is reliant on the availability of bank cash, which could be manufactured electronically, or printed, or multiplied by fractional reserve banking. The system will not rest until each child is served with her little packet of sugary unction. In other words, whatever you can sell well, the masses will buy well. The law of marginal returns have taken a global pounding in a world of altered – the Food Channel – communication.
Add to this our regular diet of water and airborne diseases and pollution, life-style and hereditary ailments, stress in urban and rural districts, narcotic use, over consumption, obesity; our personal and public health debt in the foreseeable future will skyrocket. Just as the drinks industry expanded, so has the pharmaceutical industry. Many of these products are of uncertain, negligible or no value. Many of our elderly consume pharmaceuticals unnecessarily; many use them excessively or confusedly. The expansion of pharmacies across the Caribbean and Latin America, as has been the case globally, over the past twenty years is phenomenal. This incursive industry puts a strain on personal and public debt.
In the Caribbean, there must be a Horticultural Revolution. This is not a ‘soft’ economic option. The best treatise on economic welfare and well-being were produced by men who had mental dispositions of nuns and nursemaids: Adam Smith and Karl Marx. They spent their entire lives methodically observing and creating cogent manifestos for human survival. They desired systems of good husbandry for the nation, particularly the masse, their wage-workers, subsistence poor, serfs, journeymen, proletarian.
The Horticultural Revolution involves the development of an industry, labs, agrarian schools, universities, industrial parks to foster the germination of the widest variety of seeds, a seed bank, with seeds drawn, not just from our rich indigenous species, but from all Regions of our tropical planet. And through political action by our governance, the mobilisation of the polity, build a sustainable culture and economics of fruit and tree-crop manufacture, consumption and trade. The objective is to produce a Caribbean cluster of industries dedicated to the local consumption and production, and global trade, of whole fruits and fruit-crops. The resources are all mostly here; the bane of the financial life of the entrepreneur is the high cost of raw materials produced in the international market, energy prices and import duties. In this industry, all the key raw materials are located in the Caribbean; and it involves the populace at every level.
This is an inter-generational venture. What we sow today the generations will reap tomorrow. The institutions we create today will survive and grow tomorrow. So our seed banks will be used to grow and harvest fruits. Just as you might want to grow universal IT systems for the Caribbean, where each home is linked to internet, just so you might want to create a horticultural revolution. It will revive the withering bird, bee, bat and butterfly cultures; and create exponential growth. It is these working-creatures which germinate and germinate the more. It will encourage tourism, make our islands pretty, and add to the bio, organic and oxygen mass. It will help to re-populate our islands with the denuded kingdoms of animal species.
There are four architectures that could be developed: First, the planting of fruit trees and tree crops and flowering trees in clusters, that is, orchards. Second, the planting of them in ribbon formations, along roadways and on the fringes of settlements. Third, the planting of them in integrated forms, among existing hillside forests, woods and farms. Fourth, the planting of them inside communities, in backyards, gaps and front lawns.
What then will our GDP of Vitamin C, potassium, sucrose, complex minerals and trace elements be ten years from now, twenty, fifty, one hundred years? What will be our Horticultural GDP in proportion to National GDP or Hospital and Pharmaceutical Health care GDP? It will produce the greatest health boom ever in our republics and island states. It will be our greatest antibiotic yet; and save us our bodies.
Wayne Kublalsingh
