Despite the reports over many months of looming trouble in the bauxite/alumina sector, Alpart's decision to close its Nain, St Elizabeth, plant for a year has naturally come as a shock to many people in the country. After all, for years bauxite has been a huge contributor to the Jamaican economy and most Jamaicans will not even remember a time when it was not one of the mainstays of the productive sector.

However, yesterday's main Gleaner story, in which the views of some of the 900 workers who will be out of work were reported, gives a far different picture of the closure's effect than would naturally have been anticipated. For there was little by way of despair in the reaction of the Alpart employees with whom The Gleaner spoke; in fact, they seemed largely unaffected.

It may be that some are still in a state of denial, or one of delayed reaction. We would rather think though that their rather sanguine approach is largely rooted in the soil. One man said he has two and a half acres of land planted in citrus, while another said she might "go into farming if anything".

The south St Elizabeth area has long had a reputation for food productivity, despite its notorious aridity - so it is not surprising that these two persons (and we can reasonably assume that there are more) have tilling the soil on their agenda after being uprooted from their jobs. But coming at a time when the nation as a whole is being encouraged to plant more food to offset the impact of the global financial crisis, it is striking that employees in such an apparently lucrative sector of the economy remain confident in the ability of their small farming to carry them through.

Necessity and a luxury

Certainly in terms of food (and many a supermarket owner or manager is finding this out), the recession is teaching those of us who did not know the difference between a necessity and a luxury. And the fact is that we can plant even a little of those necessities ourselves around our homes. After all, sowing a few tomatoes does not take much land space or effort.

However, it is regrettable that for many of us agriculture is the port in a storm. We should have been farming huge swathes of now idle land across Jamaica a long time ago, but now that more people are actually looking to farming, we should do our best to make it an ongoing activity.

Financial crisis

Whether or not a recession is affecting us, we should be growing food for ourselves, first of all, and second for export.

When this financial crisis ends, collectively we will certainly have more money to spend. However if, having shown that we can farm and consume more local food, we then abandon agriculture and turn our tastes back to 'foreign food', it will indicate that we simply lack the will to grow after a recession.

If we grow during one, we certainly can after it has ended and even more at that.

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