Jamaica’s manufacturing has, for decades, been anaemic. As a former plantation colony, we were never truly blessed with much manufacturing when independence was won in the 60s, and the ensuing decades have seen the slow, steady, then quick depleting and destruction of most of the manufacturing base we struggled to set up.
We now find ourselves woefully tied to the service sector, an industry which is wholly dependent on vagaries and uncontrollable things such as the weather (with tourism) and a pandemic (as seen with both BPO and tourism).
The almost total lack of a manufacturing sector is also costly and dangerously tied to those same vagaries and more when it comes to supplying the nation and those supply-chain links. A major typhoon in the East or hurricane in the Western hemisphere could cripple shipping. COVID-19 again has shown just how fragile those supply links are with some industrial countries now warning they only have supplies for up to a year should supply-links collapse.
We seem to have weathered the worst with COVID-19. A slew of vaccines are now available and it is everyday getting clearer both how to prevent and treat it as well as who those most susceptible are. Supply links will slowly if painfully re-open but we must take this time, this opportunity of dodging a bullet to ask ourselves what our industrial policy will be going forward to ensure that this kind of situation of lockdown and starve or stay open and run the gauntlet is never faced again.
jamaicachange 