THE VISION THING (or I GOT YOUR NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN RIGHT HERE!!!)

They just don't get it!

Politicians need vision. What are they, blind? It’s so obvious. You need food, energy and human development.

Fellas, can we deal with this later? I'm talking food security right now

FOOD SECURITY: It’s so dumb. You’re an agricultural country. Most of your people are employed in agriculture. And yet, you import hundreds of millions in food every year. It’s so dumb. There is no respectable country that doesn’t have food security.

ENERGY: Just lay off the bullshit talk about wind and solar because between LUCELEC and their largest shareholder, there is no intention of making less money by allowing renewable energy to become a reality. For that to wind and solar to happen successfully, there must be so much on-site, in-house wind and solar that LUCELEC either becomes smaller or finds ways to augment lost income. In the long term though, Straw is right.We're going to start building houses that don't just save energy,  they generate energy. 40-60% of their total needs, I hear. On days when it's windless,  you probably  have noff sun. The current grid will be like the fixed telephone lines - we'll need it...sometimes...some of us more than others...some of us not at all. On sunless days you'll probably have more wind. And kids, get to work on invented new cleaner more efficient batteries. You know  how  they have car batteries. We'll need house batteries. There will be days when nothing works and all we'll have is  the energy we stashed away for 'rainy days.'

We also have to start developing bio-fuels that work in diesel engines at the farm level. We already have one. Coconut oil. You could decrease the amount of fuel LUCELEC imports in a year by 20%. Coconut-diesel blends are more efficient and cleaner than diesel alone. And farmers and truckers would make a ton of money on coconuts that already exist. Much less when we start replanting.

This is NOT what Sir Arthur said to do

MANUFACTURING: Funny enough, the problem with manufacturing is agriculture. According to Sir Arthur Lewis, the manufacturing sector we need is one that uses local raw materials. All that garment manufacturing was bullshit. It would never work. It’s companies like Barons and Vikings that are the future of St Lucia. It’s packaged tamarind balls and the return of caramelized tamarinds, spicy hot mango and golden apples salads in a sealed bag in the supermarket in Montana where some pregnant white girl is willing to pay top dollar because she’s craving Caribbean.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT: Stop thinking big. Think small. Think doable. Think fiber capsules made of banana pai. Think A Level students looking into the scientific properties of gwo pawpaw and bwa bande.

Yeah Ras! Give her the bois bande!

Think of legitimizing as much of the traditional herbal medicine as possible and new ways of using useless bush of fight cancer. Think of ways to kill worms and bugs and that funging sigatoka without killing anything else. Then copyright, package, market and sell. There is bush getting cut by the roadsides now that is worth millions in the future.

POPULATION: You know one of the reasons the world doesn’t have enough stuff like food and energy and democracy?  Because there are too many damned people. And the way we are breeding in St Lucia, we’re multiplying our problems. There must be some way of putting a moratorium on unmarried people under 25 having children. The church and the condom factories really need to start collaborating on this.

What you doing here? Go!

CULTURAL EXPORT: If you were a great artist living in an American city with 200,000 people, you know what you would do? You would get the hell out of there. So why do we expect that St Lucian artists are supposed to prove themselves here before they get out. That’s ridiculous. We need to use all our friends, our leverage, our influence to get every single cultural producer in St Lucia out of here onto the market. Let them succeed or fail out there. In here, they all just waste away.

SPORTS SCHOLARSHIPS: Fuck stadiums. What we need are training facilities that help us qualify for scholarships. I don’t care if St Lucia never has a World Cup. As long as there are dozens, maybe hundreds of professional St Lucian professional football players like Zane Pierre out there making a living, sports in St Lucia is succeeding. We need to be a net exporter of athletes. All the rest is icing. All the international Twenty20s at Beausejour have done nothing for the majority of wasted athletic talent in St Lucia.

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD: For about US$25 million, you can give every child in St Lucia a laptop that is practically child proof and still have lots of laptops left over for future generations (or Vincentians and Dominicans if you’re feeling friendly). I don’t know why both Labour and Flambeau are making this thing so arduous and expensive and complicated. The guy on Oprah. The kids in Palestine and Uraguay already have theirs.

THIS ARTICLE WILL NOT END
THIS ARTICLE WILL CONTINUE  TO  BE WRITTEN
THE CONVERSATION WILL ARE HAVING WILL NOT BE IN VAIN