University of the West Indies

Background The Lancet Commission on global access to palliative care and pain relief introduced the concept of serious health-related suffering (SHS) to measure the worldwide dearth of palliative care. This Article provides an extended analysis of SHS from 1990 to 2021 and the corresponding global palliative care need.

The chapter examines the governance structures of the EU-Caribbean inter-regional governance relationship. The actors, processes, and major issue areas are addressed. The Caribbean has had a long-standing relationship with the EU dating back to Lome I in 1975. Their engagement has been mainly conducted via CARIFORUM in the framework of the African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) group of states, now the OACPS. EU efforts to engage with the Caribbean within the LAC framework began in the 1990s but gained traction only after 2011, following the establishment of CELAC and the subsequent EU–CELAC Strategic Partnership. Primary documents, secondary texts, and expert interviews were utilized to execute the research and analysis. The findings suggest that the LAC framework is not yet integral to the Caribbean’s engagement with the EU. The relationship is asymmetrical but has yielded benefits to both sides. The chapter concludes that governance institutions and processes need to be re-engineered and revitalized to retain relevance, legitimacy, and strategic value for the parties.

Traditional obesity-related public health messaging often includes physical activity (PA) recommendations. However, at the population level, the data are conflicting, especially when comparing different self-reported vs. measured techniques across different settings and populations. We measured the association between moderate-to-vigorous intensity PA (MVPA) and prospective weight change across five African-origin populations and the extent to which MVPA attenuated weight change over time. At baseline, 2,500 adults (median age: 37y) were recruited into the Modelling the Epidemiologic Transition Study (METS), from Ghana, South Africa, Jamaica, Seychelles, and US. 2000 participants were followed up 8 years later, with 851 participants having complete 7-day accelerometry to measure MVPA at both time points. Generalised estimating equations were used to explore the longitudinal association between weight and MVPA adjusted for several confounders. The obesity prevalence at baseline was 27.5% which increased to 38.0% at follow-up. Baseline MVPA varied from 7 (IQR: 4, 16) min/day in US women to 52 (IQR: 36, 78) min/day in South African men, and similarly at follow-up ranged from 8 min/day to 41 min/day among the same participant groups. While overall, engaging in higher MVPA levels was associated with a lower body weight, such that every additional 30 min of MVPA equalled a 600 g lower body weight (p = 0.04), the interaction between time and MVPA was not statistically significant (p = 0.18). Therefore, regardless of the amount of MVPA at any time point, body weight increased over time. Despite the association between MVPA and weight, our results suggest that objectively measured longitudinal MVPA was not associated with the change in 8-year weight in African-origin adults. Our research confirms that while PA is a critical determinant of cardiovascular health, it alone may not be enough to stem the rising obesity burden.

The Government Savings Bank of Jamaica (GSB) was created post-emancipation in order to serve the poor as a vehicle for precautionary savings and has been viewed as largely successful in this goal, at least after its restructuring in the late 1860s. We investigate this by examining GSB depositor behaviour after income shocks due to hurricanes. To this end, we combine digitized parish-level GSB account information with a hurricane damage index generated from historical storm tracks. Our results show little evidence of a precautionary savings motive by GSB account holders in that while net account balances and deposits drop after hurricanes, withdrawals and the number of accounts closed also fall. Additionally, the net decrease in account holders seems not to be driven by small savers, who are likely to be the poorest. Our findings are thus more in line with the GSB potentially being used to finance non-necessary consumption.

This chapter examines the main terms of the Treaty completed between the British and the Maroons in 1739. This Treaty accorded privileges and responsibilities to the Maroons, but it did not seek to grant Maroons sovereignty over Accompong. On the contrary, the Treaty acknowledged the freedom of the Maroons but obliged them, as part of a soulless quid pro quo, to capture and return all enslaved persons to the British slave owners. Some historians also posit that the Treaty granted a degree of autonomy to the Maroons analogous to sovereignty. This chapter refutes the idea, emphasizing that even if the Maroons had some autonomy, this did not mean that, as a matter of law, a Maroon state had been established within Jamaican.

Various international legal arguments, based primarily on self-determination, have been advanced to justify Maroon sovereignty over Accompong, Jamaica. These arguments proceed from the assumption that the Maroons are a distinct people, entitled as an indigenous group, to the legal right of self-determination, including the right to sovereignty. This chapter identifies the main weaknesses inherent in the International Law arguments in vogue among supporters of Maroon sovereignty in Accompong and demonstrates why these arguments are unconvincing. Among other things, the right to self-determination, as recognized by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960) does not allow any group to disrupt the territorial integrity of Jamaica.

This chapter departs from legal argumentation and considers some broad social attitudes taken by Jamaicans towards the Maroons. For the most part, Jamaicans do not regard Maroons as non-Jamaicans, and are opposed to special socio-economic privileges for Maroons as a group. Some Jamaicans have been sharply critical of the Maroons for their apparent willingness to collaborate with the British in preserving colonial structures and enslavement in the past. Other Jamaicans adopt a more sympathetic perspective, suggesting that Maroons, a brave and determined group of people, were obliged by difficult historical circumstances to collaborate with the British as a means of survival within an oppressive social system.

In 1739, Britain as the colonial power in Jamaica entered into a treaty (the “Treaty”) with the Maroons of Accompong, a community extending over approximately 1500 acres in the Jamaican heartland. The Maroons were persons of African descent who had escaped from enslavement and had fiercely defended their freedom against British incursions into their settlements. Since the time of the Treaty, some Maroons have argued that the Accompong community constitutes a sovereign state within Jamaica. This chapter reviews this claim and sets out the resistance to the claim advanced by the Government of Jamaica.

In parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, there has been judicial recognition of customary rights to land for some distinct groups of people, namely the Mayans in Belize and the Saramaka people in Suriname. This recent development has stimulated the view that Maroon sovereignty rights could soon be recognized by Jamaica’s domestic courts as part of a modern trend. This argument is of doubtful validity. The courts recognizing customary land rights in Belize and Suriname—the Caribbean Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights—have not supported the idea that either the Mayans or Saramakans have sovereignty in their respective areas. Moreover, the courts that have recognized customary land rights do not have binding authority in respect of Jamaican legal matters.

Following 1739, the British Government retained authority over Maroon communities and gradually passed laws that treated the Maroons on the same terms as other Jamaicans. This approach became more pronounced with the end of slavery in Jamaica in 1838. By 1956, in the Man O. Rowe Case, the Jamaican Court of Appeal held that Jamaican law was generally applicable in Maroon territories as elsewhere on the island. At the time of Jamaica’s independence in 1962, no special provisions concerning Maroons or Maroon sovereignty were contemplated in the Jamaican Constitution.

The seeds of Theobroma cacao L. are highly valued for their high content and composition of cocoa butter. Across many plant species, both parental genotypes influence seed lipid traits, but this phenomenon has not been deeply studied in cacao. Here, seeds from reciprocal crosses of cacao genotypes PA150 and SCA6, as well as from open pollinated fruits of PA150 were used to investigate the maternal and paternal influences on cocoa butter content, triglyceride composition, and thermal properties such as melting and recrystallization. Fat content was found to vary significantly among the seeds of the three differentially generated fruits. PA150 open pollinated had the highest significant total fat content (53.84%), followed by PA150 maternal x SCA6 paternal (50.97%) and SCA6 maternal x PA150 paternal (46.87%). The composition of several triglycerides and physical traits were also found to vary significantly among the progeny of these crosses. There were significant differences between reciprocal crosses (PA150 maternal x SCA6 paternal and SCA6 maternal x PA150 paternal) in melting peak temperature, POP and OOO content. There were also significant differences in melting enthalpy, recrystallization peak, POP, POS, SOS, OOO, and PPS content between the PA150 maternal x SCA6 paternal and PA150 open pollinated crosses. Directionality of the cross significantly affected cocoa butter traits tested in this study which is of importance for the development of specified functional traits useful for culinary, cosmetic, and pharmaceutical uses.

There is an urgent need for global citizens to develop sustainable development competencies (SDCs) if our world is to survive threats to its development and sustainability. These competencies can be developed through education for sustainable development (ESD). However, implementing ESD is challenged by teachers’ and students’ prioritisation of the assessed curriculum while ESD remains largely unassessed in the education sector. The knowledge, skills, values and attitudes reflected in tests and assessments, especially large-scale, standardised, summative tests, influence classroom practices considerably. This paper proposes that the integration of SDCs can be accelerated by constructing large-scale tests to measure these competencies, thereby capitalising on the influence of the tests. It presents a model for constructing these tests and provides ways in which the format of multiple choice and extended written response items may be optimised to measure SDCs.