The Vultures’ Share

In the jungles of the world, there is a cycle of survival, set out from time immemorial and unchanged to this day. It is the law of Mother Nature that applies to the hunting of one animal by another and the subsequent stages that are followed in a set sequence, from which deviations are few.
Take for example, the plains of Africa, where Nature has decreed that the antelope has been marked out as one of the main providers of food for the large predators, like the lion.
Following the call of the wild, the King of the Beasts preys on the fat antelope and gorges himself on its flesh, choosing all the best parts for himself.
When he is sated, he leaves the remains behind and it becomes the job of scavengers to pick out what they can manage to glean from the discarded carcass. Wild dogs and hyenas fight among themselves for the scraps, until even they can no longer find anything to strip from the remains.
It does not however, end there … for even among scavengers, there is a pecking order; and what the hyenas are unable to clean from the skeleton will still afford nourishment to the vultures, who have the ability to pick out the most minute particles of flesh from the bones, until those remain completely bare, white and spotless under the hot African sun.
Why the above analogy? Because it somehow seems to parallel what has and continues to take place within the banana industry in our local jungle. If we liken the industry to the antelope, there was a time when it was healthy, fat and vibrant and the mainstay of our economy. It was food for everyone.

And the lions came in, both local and foreign and fed upon it … and effectively killed it off. Foreign lions, like the large international banana companies, sought its death by protesting the arrangements we had in place that gave us the preferential treatment we needed in order to help it survive; and local lions went on no-cut strikes, burnt down fields and banana sheds, demanded that its management be taken away from government and put it into their hands … and drained its lifeblood.
By hyenas, the carcass was fought over for the remaining spoils; it was used for political gain until it was officially declared dead by Government, with the assertion that its place had been taken over by Tourism.
Today, the bones of this once alive-and-vibrant entity are being fought over by the last of the scavengers – just as fiercely as once fought the lions and the hyenas.
It is amazing to behold organizations taking each other to court; farmers coming out in numbers to complain and demonstrate; threats and accusations of corruption being bandied back and forth; accounting being demanded of monies that have either been misspent or have gone missing; boards of directors trying to oust and supplant each other; police having to intervene at meetings that threaten to turn drastically violent … over an entity that once boasted the participation of six thousand or more farmers, whose bones now support sparse hundreds.
But, as is the way with Nature, even the vultures will fight for their share of the dead antelope.