Editorial | Reviving agriculture

Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ identification of the inadequacy of a “commercial ecosystem that supports long-term investment” by farmers, correctly diagnosed a critical problem affecting Jamaica’s agriculture sector. But only one of them.

And it won’t be solved solely by the PM instructing his agriculture and tourism ministers, Floyd Green and Edmund Bartlett, to facilitate long-term supply contracts between farmers and tourism operators, although that will help.

As this newspaper has long argued, any meaningful resuscitation, expansion and modernisation of Jamaica’s agriculture will most likely find success in the context of an orchestrated industrial policy that includes state-supported investment in research and development and innovation, and importantly, a rational land use policy. With respect to the latter, The Gleaner again recommends to the Government that it draws a red line under existing developments and calls a halt to any future real estate projects, including the building of new cities or townships, on arable/farm lands.

In that regard, the Government should reverse its plan for its 16,000-home city at Barnard Lodge, the former sugar plantation on the island’s south coast, which the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) described as possessing Jamaica’s “most fertile … A1” soil. That moratorium should extend to any part of the arable lands of Caymanas Estate, also in the south, on which housing and industrial development may be contemplated. However, to be clear, taking estates and slicing them into five-acre lots, which are then distributed to presumed farmers, won’t, without far more, translate to agricultural productivity. Jamaica tried that before with deleterious outcomes.

POLICY SHIFT

On the matter of real estate development, there is sufficient marginal land on the island where green field developments of the type proposed by the administration can happen. Moreover, the authorities should undertake a policy shift that emphasises brown field developments, including urban renewal projects.

Jamaica has a food import bill of US$1.4 billion, a substantial chunk of which goes to purchase of food consumed by the more than two million stop-over visitors to the island. When cruise ship passengers are added, the island hosts over four million tourists annually.

Opening a symposium of the Caribbean Poultry Association (CPA) in Kingston last week, Dr Holness did not specifically address the food import bill, but said that the authentic experience of visitors to Jamaica should extend to the island’s food. This, he suggested, required a partnership between farmers and tourism sectors, including the poultry industry’s model of providing “your farmers long-term supply contracts so they can make, up-front, the investments, and know that it is secured in terms of the recovery”. Under arrangements to which the prime minister referred, large poultry companies enter supply agreements with small farmers, to whom they also provide technical support.

Extending the concept to other areas of agriculture, Dr Holness said: “We have to create the commercial ecosystem that supports the long-term investment of farmers that gives them that certainty and security of returns so they can invest in increasing output.”

This is one obvious leg to help sustain the growth of domestic agriculture and enhance food security, especially in a global context where supply chains are under attack – physically, as well as by tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade. Domestic analysts have said that Jamaica could shave between a fifth and a quarter from its food import bill, which would mean foreign exchange savings of between US$280 million and US$350 million annually. Looked at another way, that, at the top end, would be over J$55.6 billion – but for the expenditure on the intermediary goods – that facilitate the growing of the substitutes – that would remain in the local economy, available for investment and consumption.

IN LINE

A successful Jamaican food import substitution programme would be in line with the Caribbean Community’s project to reduce the region’s food import bill by 25 per cent, five years later than initially projected.

But Jamaica’s agriculture, which accounts for around eight per cent of the island’s GDP, faces substantial challenges, not least of which is the low productivity of its more than 184,000 farmers, the bulk of whom are over 50. They mostly employ low technology (hand tools) and farm small plots, averaging around two acres. Support systems, like irrigation and supply chain mechanisms, are limited and only a relatively small proportion of the island’s farm output undergoes further processing.

Further, like other sectors, Jamaica’s agriculture suffers from the island’s low expenditure in research and development (a little more than a quarter of one per cent of GDP, against a global average of two per cent) and too little innovation.

In many respects, Jamaica has regressed from, say, 70 years ago, when the island’s renowned animal geneticist, Dr T.P. Lecky, developed the famed cattle breeds, the Jamaica Hope, Jamaica Red, Jamaica Black, Jamaica Brahman, and there was frenetic ongoing research on crops such as sugar cane and bananas.

The resuscitation of agriculture, therefore, ought to be part of a larger coordinated industrial policy aimed at lifting the economy from its low wage, low technology, low productivity rut, which brings together education and training, research, investment and marketing, underlined by facilitatory government policies.