Once widely respected in the region as a country that has never shirked from turning to the land to ensure its food security bona fides, there is, these days, concern that the number of local farmers is continuing to dwindle, according to the Jamaica Agriculture Society (JAS). The President of the JAS, Lenworth Fulton, has reportedly said that he wants the Jamaican government to fashion a set of policies to rebuild agriculture on the island.
The news of Jamaica’s seemingly ‘slipping’ agriculture bona fides, published in the April 3 issue of the Jamaica Observer, comes at a time when the Caribbean, as a whole, is experiencing a food security challenge the extent of which has attracted attention at the level of key United Nations food security-related organizations and triggered a regional food security initiative spearheaded by Guyana and Barbados to establish a food security terminal and to create a reliable mechanism for moving agricultural produce to the most hard-hit countries in the region. In Jamaica, agriculture experts have reportedly expressed concern over the fact that an increasing number of youths are leaving the sector.
It asserts that recent data published by the country’s Statistical Institute of Jamaica (Statin) point to a decline of 6.9 per cent (13,000 persons) in the country’s ‘Skilled Agricultural and Fishery Workers’ occupation group. The Observer report says that the most affected areas in the sector include the coffee industry in which the number of farmers slipped from 15,000 farmers to less than 5,000 between 2000 and the present time. Coffee is one of Jamaica’s blue ribbon agricultural exports. The content of the Jamaica Observer suggests that Jamaica’s workers in the agriculture are “moving out of farming,” drifting towards jobs as “Service Workers and Shop and Market Sales Workers.” The Observer article quotes Fulton as saying that “The agriculture sector is suffering from limited financial resources and funding… when youngsters look and see the tourism or financial services industry being propped up, nobody is going to be interested in agriculture.”
The seeming loss of interest in the agriculture sector in Jamaica would appear not to have escaped the attention of the Jamaican government with The Observer disclosing that the country’s Agriculture Minister, Floyd Green, is aiming to have the contribution to the GDP move from around 8.3% to around 9%. To get there, according to The Gleaner article, the Jamaican government is moving to inject J$1 billion into the sector to provide production incentives and a further J&800 million to the country’s ‘farm-road programme.’
Beyond those initiatives, The Observer article alludes to the upgrading of irrigation in various parts of the country which are targeted for completion this year. As in other parts of the Caribbean, efforts to build a thriving agriculture sector are bedeviled by hostile climate, praedial larceny, limited and weak infrastructure and labour shortage, shortcomings that obtain in other countries in the region.
