Caught up in a debilitating drought that is impacting the various sectors of social and economic life on the island, Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member state, Jamaica, has been compelled to pay particular attention to the impact of the water scarcity on the country’s agriculture sector. A Wednesday April 10 Jamaica Observer report has disclosed that the scale of the drought has been sufficiently severe as to cause the authorities to be compelled to truck nine million gallons of water to approximately nine hundred farmers in various parts of the country. The impact of the drought and the government’s reaction thereto has been deemed sufficiently significant to have caused the disclosure of the government’s response by Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness himself. As part of his disclosure, Prime Minister Holness also reported that government had also responded to the drought by allocating J$150 million in an effort to ‘roll back’ the effects of which have been particularly impactful in several of the country’s farming parishes.
In reporting to the nation on the drought and its impact, Prime Minister Holness reportedly told Jamaicans that the response of the government to the drought was “part of a now well established drought mitigation programme,” a point that sought to underscore the vulnerability of the country’s agriculture to the vagaries of the Caribbean weather. The ensuing official action designed to mitigate the effect of the drought in farming communities saw the country’s Ministry of Agriculture move to truck water to the parishes of St Elizabeth and Manchester, through an exercise driven by the country’s Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA). The country’s National Irrigation Commission (NIC) has also been pressed into service to ramp up the supply volumes required to effectively respond to the emergency.
For all its recent weather-related travails, Jamaica’s agriculture sector has still found much to celebrate recently. Jamaica had its second-highest crop production level in 2023 despite the drought. In the light of the disclosure made earlier this month by the island’s State Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining Franklin Witter said that the country had succeeded in recording its second-highest domestic crop production level in 2023, producing 779,254 tonnes of local crops, the adverse weather conditions of 2023 notwithstanding. Jamaica is regarded as one of the stalwarts of agriculture in the Caribbean, the sector reportedly employing upwards of 200,000 people.
