No Time to Lose

Common Sense
John Maxwell

"A robin redbreast in a cage," according to William Blake, "puts all heaven in a rage." A nation in a cage - eight million people in prison - does not disturb too many people; certainly not the Great White Fathers who control our world.

These Great White hypocrites were much moved, it was reported, by the plight of a single Christian proselyte in Afghanistan who stood to lose his head for abandoning his faith.

Nearer home, in Haiti, thousands of innocent people in jail, put there by outlaws, gangsters, professional murderers and rapists, could not stir the lively consciences of these leaders of the free world in Washington, London, Paris and Ottawa. The fate of innocent schoolgirls, sodomised by soldiers in the street, was of no account to these bozos in their ivory towers.
It was a different country, and besides, there are no votes there.

Parsons and Politics

I don't have a problem with parsons in politics, partly because my father was one, and a good one. He must have been good, since he was almost a pauper when he died.

That was then.

Today, preachers have an entirely different public image, not so cuddly or altruistic, more inclined, like bankers, to keep a sharp eye out for souls "worth saving".

Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has called for preachers to be given special privilege in the affairs of state. She wants them put on as many authorities as possible, to lend "probity" or at least the appearance of probity.

The PM must realise that while people respect her own religious views, Jamaica is only nominally a Christian country and that she cannot, like the current US administration, attempt to inflict her beliefs on everyone else. Crucially, it appears that many so-called Christians don't seem to be able to agree on very much and tend to give the impression that religion is, for too many, a means to get rich quickly.

Jamaica is littered with enormous, grandiose structures, built by community savings but no longer serving any community purpose. The development progression is as follows: first there is a small tent and a few chairs, followed in a few months by a bigger tent, more chairs and an enormous sound system.

Then construction begins on a very large structure, then somehow the construction work ends and the building remains unfinished, the pastor has gone abroad to "look more money" while the people's savings remain entombed in a totally useless concrete monstrosity.

For many Jamaicans, myself included, parsons must put their money where their mouths are. If we are all in the development process we all need to demonstrate that we deserve a seat at the table, parsons deserve respect to the extent that they earn it - just like anyone else. And nothing can so quickly discredit an administration as the appearance of probity and integrity without the substance.

I remember 40 years ago, when we were faced with an acute shortage of school space, suggesting in Public Opinion that we could partially solve the problem if the churches would lend some of their buildings for schools during the week. The Roman Catholics were the only denomination to respond positively. There was a total lack of response from the thousands of evangelical churches whose buildings were much more conveniently situated than the Catholics'.

I am really scared by the idea of parsons on the National Family Planning Board, for instance, or the National Environmental & Planning Agency deciding, purely on principle, you understand, whether children are entitled to be taught the elements of human reproduction, or whether a cemetery is a serious threat to the environment.

The PM is in a crucial phase of her administration. The overwhelming majority of Jamaicans want her to do well, while others are praying for disaster. The window of her opportunity is narrow and she has a great deal of work to do.

People want to know about her plans for community consultation and development and that's what she needs to explain now. We have two looming crises which need to be prepared for on the community level. The first major crisis is the hurricane season; the second, the possibility of an epidemic of avian flu.

Building Social Capital

We have, over several years, managed to produce a pretty adequate system to deal with the immediate after-effects of a hurricane. We have not yet produced anything like the Cuban system which moves entire cities out of harm's way before the hurricane strikes.

As hurricanes become more frequent and much more dangerous, we need to mobilise the society to respond more quickly and effectively to the threat of disaster - that is, we must make ourselves more able to avert disaster by moving people and movable assets out of the path of destruction before the crisis arrives.

The development of such responses will be crucial in avoiding the worst economic and social losses produced by hurricanes. Obviously we cannot develop such capacities overnight; among the necessary and missing factors now are high levels of community trust and comradeship.

But there is a bright spot: the Jamaican community is, at this moment, very receptive to initiatives which will summon people to a higher level of social concern and responsibility. If Portia is really going to make a difference, here is one area which begs for mobilisation. And it is an area in which most people have some level of experience and expertise - an area in which the wisdom of the people waits to be harvested and co-ordinated.

I believe that the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management mobilising volunteers and in co-operation with the Army, the Red Cross and with advice and help from the Cubans would, in a few months, be able to make enormous differences in minimising loss from predictable natural disasters. At the end of the hurricane season, as communities evaluated their work, they would also be able to better understand the value of their co-operation and to appreciate the meaning of the social capital they have accumulated.

Bird Flu Threat

According to the best estimates, people in the Americas may have up to nine months to prepare to deal with an outbreak of the Asian bird flu. What worries health experts is the possibility that the H5N1 avian flu virus will combine with a human flu virus and trigger a global flu pandemic.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that if this happens, the world would have just weeks to contain the virus before it spreads, possibly killing millions of people.

H5N1 is an avian flu strain that emerged in Hong Kong in 1997, killing or forcing the destruction of 1.5 million chickens, ducks and geese, infecting 18 people and killing six. The WHO says the quick slaughter of all potentially infected birds may have averted a pandemic. However, the virus reappeared in a deadlier form last year and has caused havoc among poultry in Asia, Europe and Africa this year.

Now, according to the world's leading expert, the spread of bird flu across Europe, Asia and Africa suggests that the virus is moving more rapidly than anyone predicted and is closer to a critical mutation that would make it more easily transmissible between humans.

"We expected it to move, but not many of us thought it would move quite like this," said Dr David Nabarro, co-ordinator on bird flu efforts at the United Nations. "Something generally disturbing is going on at the moment. It's certainly in the bird world, and it's pushing up against the human world in a serious way."

Nabarro describes himself as "quite scared", especially since the disease has broken out of Eastern Asia and reached birds in Africa, Europe and India much faster than he expected it to.

"That rampant, explosive spread, and the dramatic way it's killing poultry so rapidly suggests that we've got a very beastly virus in our midst." According to Dr Nabarro: "The infection of millions more birds in many more countries "has led to an exponential increase of the load of virus in the world".

And influenza is a fast-mutating virus. Each infected bird and person is actually awash in minutely different strains, and it takes lengthy genetic testing to sequence each one. So if a pandemic strain were to appear, "it might be quite difficult for us to pick up that change when it happens". Birds that survive infection with H5N1 excrete the virus for at least 10 days, orally and in faeces, making it highly likely to spread.

Overall 103 people have succumbed to it, but experts fear that if the critical mutation occurs, it will spread like wildfire and kill millions of people the world over. Dr Robert Webster, who has been studying the virus since 1997, says that the virus can no longer be controlled. "Nature is in control," he said.

Jamaica and other island nations are in some ways, naturally quarantined against certain diseases, but bird flu is not one of them. Migratory birds, usually wild ducks, are the natural "reservoir" of avian influenza viruses, and usually do not become sick when infected. Domestic poultry, including chickens and turkeys, die quickly when infected.

If a human pandemic does begin, anywhere in the world, most experts forecast widespread economic disaster. The first casualty of a pandemic will be international travel; tourism worldwide will shut down overnight and the vast populations which depend on tourism will need to find some other way to subsist.

Second, if bird flu is discovered in one chicken in Jamaica, the entire poultry stock will have to be destroyed. It will not be easy to explain to people who own a chicken or two that their apparently healthy birds must not only be killed, but burned or buried in the public interest. We should probably ban the bird pet trade now and get ready to stop all poultry imports.

So even if we don't lose thousands of people to the virus, we will almost certainly suffer enormous economic damage by the destruction of the poultry industry - economic disaster for thousands of people, from poultry farmers to sidewalk 'jerkers' - unless we prepare to mitigate the damage. We need to start now.

There are some things we can do while there still appears to be time. The Chinese, who grow one-fifth of all the world's poultry, have begun a highly efficient effort to vaccinate the country's 14 billion birds of all kinds. It may make sense for us to try either to buy some of this vaccine or to ask the Chinese for help in producing our own vaccine.

Again, in such a scenario, the help of the Cubans would be vital, because they are among the very few countries in this hemisphere with the scientific manufacturing capability to produce the high quality products needed in such an enterprise. We should begin a co-ordinated regional response, including all of our neighbours, whatever language they speak.

We need to make major contingency plans for the pandemic. We will not be able to import food, because travel and world trade will come to a standstill. We will therefore need to prepare food contingency plans. These should include the development of the kind of measures used during the second World War.

These programmes need to be started now and the government should, in my view, immediately begin to buy and/or import seed for easily grown garden vegetables and perhaps begin a programme for the rapid expansion of the small livestock industry. Chicken farmers need to be given incentives for growing pigs, goats, sheep and rabbits. School farming programmes must be introduced and stimulated.

Whether there is a pandemic or not, diversifying our domestic food supply will certainly make us safer and probably healthier.

Finally, we should immediately compel cane farmers to convert 10 per cent of their productive land to domestic food crops, to plant corn, cassava, potato, yam and other crops. If we begin now, we have enough time to make ourselves relatively safe while raising the social capital. Whether there is an epidemic or not, we are certain to be better off. And we need to prepare for running a country in which most shops, offices, schools and other public buildings will be closed and people will need to work from home and be taught at home.

The time to begin solving these problems is now.