For most of his long life there is one position from which Ray Hadeed never wavered: that manufacturing was critical to Jamaica's economic development.

This was not an abstraction for Mr. Hadeed. For more than half a century, with significant success as an industrialist and entrepreneur, he gave practical expression to his beliefs, particularly through the Serv-Wel group of companies, which he founded in the mid-1950s.

Unfortunately, when Ray Hadeed died this week, aged 87, both the global and domestic environment had long since changed. In a market with the absence of protection, Jamaica could no longer compete with imported manufactured goods, especially in the white goods that used to be produced in the factories he owned.

Indeed, the fact that Serv-Wel is now a shadow of its glory days, particularly the period of the 1970s when it expanded into the eastern Caribbean, is mirrored across Jamaica's entire manufacturing sector. These days, manufacturing accounts for 13 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) and employs 80,000, against 25 per cent of GDP three and half decades ago, when more than 100,000 worked in manufacturing.

The decline is not an indictment of people like Ray Hadeed, of their vision or their efforts. For truth be told, Ray Hadeed and his contemporaries played a major role in lifting Jamaica up the early rungs of the development ladder. They helped to create jobs and wealth.

The existing circumstance is, in part, the result of a failure of Jamaica as a whole to respond appropriately, and with the necessary urgency, to shifting global circumstances. To put it bluntly, as the country went off at ideological tangents, a lack of economic and political consensus weakened policy formulation and delivered stagnation. In the end, we were blind-sided by market liberalisation and, ultimately, full-blown globalisation.

Mr. Hadeed, when he started Serv-Wel, may not have anticipated the current shape of the global economy or the issues that dominate negotiations at theWorld Trade Organisation. He was nonetheless canny enough to anticipate that in the future there would be storms against which Jamaica, standing on its own, was unlikely to survive.

Ray Hadeed, as the then president of the Jamaica Manufacturers' Association (JMA), therefore, was a proponent of Jamaica's membership, at the time of its launch in 1968, of the Caribbean Free Trade Area (Carifta), as well as Carifta's successor, the Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom). He, we believe, saw the utility and wisdom of the seamless regional economic space presumed in the Caricom Single Market and Economy. Indeed, long before other Jamaica firms contemplated the efficacy of a place in the regional market, Mr. Hadeed established a manufacturing subsidiary in Antigua.

But despite a vision of the Caribbean that was broader than most of his contemporaries, Ray Hadeed had a deep passion for Jamaica he was actually born in Syria - a fact only betrayed in any substantive accent that was not Jamaican. Ray Hadeed was Jamaican and Jamaica owes him a debt of gratitude.

We would honour Ray Hadeed not by attempting do what he did the way he did it, but by understanding today's realities, finding specific niches in which Jamaica has a compe-titive advantage and implementing appropriate policies for those who venture into them.

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