What happens when we become ‘asset poor’ and are still indebted?

 

 

The land we had been brought here to cultivate, the land that for hundreds of years was beyond our grasp, the land that our local heroes Bradshaw and Simmonds had secured for us and put within our grasp, thereby righting the wrongs of three hundred years… yes, this land was about to be taken from us - again relegating us to the status of being a landless people.

 

“Hold on to your property, and will it to your children” sang the late great King Arrow.

 

But what of those who do not yet have property?  Will they and their children be destined to roam this land with a deep feeling of inferiority and the stigma of being “forever landless”?

 

This situation could have been avoided if sugar workers, who along with their ancestors had toiled on our lands for over three hundred years, had been allocated portions of land on the closure of the Sugar Industry. By now we would have developed a peasantry – a bloc of people who would not have to be told to make agriculture a priority at this time – a bloc of people who had collateral and had become “bankable”, who could afford to live off the land without looking to government for handouts.

 

This tsunami of emotions we are now experiencing are as a result of the earthquake of revelations coming from the Press Conference jointly held by the Prime Minister of St. Kitts Nevis and the IMF representative here on Friday 10th June. Both the Prime Minister and the IMF representative agreed that although St. Kitts Nevis was highly indebted (200% of GDP), it was “asset rich”.  It was therefore OK to borrow US $84 million from the IMF.

 

There was no doubt from the statements that the assets referred to was our land.

 

The confirmation comes from the Prime Minister:

 

“One of the groups that we have been speaking with is the IFC which is the private sector part of the World Bank, and they are working out a strategy as to how we can use this enormous asset of our land to help retire some of our debt, especially as the debt repayments become due,” the Prime Minister said.

 

 

There is a definite move afoot to sell our lands to retire some of our debt, but what fills us with consternation is that the matter now seems to be already out of the hands of Prime Minister and he is not even sure what will happen or how much land will be sold according to his self-confessed statement on the matter - as reported by WinnFm.com.

 

“One of the groups that we have been speaking with is the IFC which is the private sector part of the World Bank, and they are working out a strategy as to how we can use this enormous asset of our land to help retire some of our debt, especially as the debt repayments become due,” the Prime Minister said. 

 

“WINN FM asked Dr. Douglas how much of the country’s sugar lands were being held as security by the National Bank and whether or not monies from the IMF would be used to settle SSMC debts.

 

“We do not know what the debt advisors are going to do,” he responded, referring to British debt consultants hired by the government.

 

 “They’re now mapping out their strategy as to how they’re going to deal with it. But let me say that when we did take over the SSMC debt, we knew then that 1 200 acres would satisfy that entire $400 million.” (How much land, we wonder, would satisfy 3 billion dollars)

So as we hang…dangling in the wind, we are forced to ask, “What happens when we become ‘asset poor’ and are still indebted?”

 

This is the question for which we have no answers and this feeling of uncertainty is driving our worst fears.  It is ironical that while we were re-hashing June 10th and the alleged attempt to overthrow the Labour Government, that same government on June 10th of this year was overthrowing the people by agreeing to push them into small pockets of land and making the majority of them landless once more.  How can this situation be reversed?