For the better part of the year, so far, Jacklow, Pomeroon farmer, Oscar Richmond, has been watching a ‘new normal’ unfold before him. The accustomed routines associated with ‘doing business’ have either changed dramatically or vanished altogether and while his greatest wish is for a sense of normalcy to return, Oscar would appear to have come to terms with the reality that some of the changes may be permanent.
Farming, he explains, has about it an underpinning of predictability. You sow, you reap, and you market, and then you repeat the process. Intertwined with that regimen are the structures that hold the process together… like bargaining with the middleman over prices and dealing with what are often the complicated logistics of moving produce over long distances, to market. Your entire life is built around the predictabilities that attend those processes and when those are disturbed by unexpected interventions over which you have little if any control and particularly if the interventions persist, the process can become fraught with uncertainties. The weakening of procedures that have long held the ‘system’ together can be frightening. If these sustain themselves you can eventually reach a point where you are in a fight for your livelihood.
How close to that point the COVID-19 pandemic has brought Oscar is probably not yet clear.
