While in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Beryl businesses in Jamaica that depended heavily on the agriculture sector for substantial amounts of both their local and external earnings are still focused on recovery, the country’s Agriculture Minister Floyd Green recently provided assurances that the sector is poised to make a speedy recovery, rather than have to enjoy a prolonged period of stagnation and/or decline. The news, reportedly, has been uplifting for the many Jamaican business owners whose local and foreign earnings depend heavily on the by-products derived from the country’s commercial farms.
Much of the strength of Jamaica’s agriculture sector reposes in its links with agro processing factories that create processed products largely for export to the lucrative United States market. What Beryl has effectively done is to shrink the capacity of the country’s agro processing sector and by extension, the earnings of businesses that invest heavily in the sector.
Concerned that any protracted delay in restoring the agriculture sector could have an even longer-term knock on effect on local manufacturers and on the country’s economy as a whole, Green disclosed in the country’s National Assembly last week that the government was sufficiently concerned to have “pumped an additional one billion dollars into the sector” specifically to assist farmers in the re-planting exercise.
The Sunday September 29 Radio Jamaica story quoted the Agriculture Minister as saying that critical to tackling the restoration of farms and the restoration of crops was the official distribution of millions of dollars’ worth of fertilizers and seedlings to hundreds of farmers, a measure designed to accelerate the recovery exercise. While the state support has reportedly targeted the country’s agriculture sector, as a whole, the Radio Jamaica report on the exercise alluded to assistance targeting the coffee, poultry and livestock farmers, whom the report said had “suffered major loses during the hurricane.”
Green has sought to provide Jamaica’s farmers and exporters with assurances that the government was treating the post-Beryl restoration of the country’s economy as a priority though other smaller countries in the region are reportedly still, to varying degrees, caught up in Hurricane Beryl-related food security emergencies.
While the impact of Beryl has been confined to some countries in the region, CARICOM’s ‘lead Head’ of Government with responsibility for agriculture and food security, Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali, is reportedly seeking a ‘holistic’ approach to the region’s post Beryl food security challenges. Those challenges had earlier engaged the attention of CARICOM, as a whole, though there is no record of the outcome of the ‘strategic’ meeting having been placed in the public.
President Ali is already reportedly on record as expressing “grave concern” over the extent of the impact which the intervention of Beryl will have on the 25 by 2025 food security plan, which is intended to reduce the Region’s food import bill by 25 per cent by 2025. There has been no formal official pronouncement here in the region on what, now, will be the likely fate of the 25×2025 chatter that has pervaded the region for some while.
President Ali himself had reportedly described the “initial impact” of the hurricane on the 25×2025 ambition as “heart-wrenching… because of the tremendous investment, the tremendous policy commitments, and budget support that was placed in the agriculture sector.” The President had reportedly gone on record as saying that “since 2020, the investment in infrastructure, water systems, technology, crop variety, farm support, farm to market infrastructure, many of these countries would have lost all of these investments.”
While there has been no post-Beryl reporting on the likely re-setting of the 25×2025 target, it is not unlikely that Beryl may well have impacted on the region staying within the deadline.
