Editorial | A paradigm shift in agriculture

For the better part of two decades, Mark Brooks’ was a mostly lonely voice , arguing that the island’s ‘sick’ soil was among the causes for Jamaica’s poor agricultural yields.

“It’s a worldwide problem, but Jamaica is very bad,” the St Elizabeth farmer and agriculturist told this newspaper in 2015. “It doesn’t make the news ... because it is not sexy. People don’t want to talk about it. Yet, it is so newsworthy in the sense of the impact it has.”

It isn’t quite true that the soil issue wasn’t talked about. The late agriculture minister, Roger Clarke, once did in Parliament, a decade ago. He established a technical working group on soil health in the agriculture ministry.

But the essence of Mr Brooks’ argument remains unimpeachable: of the need to take a broad, multi-sectoral approach to position Jamaica’s economy for development and growth. Agriculture is part of this mix.

Mark Brooks’ campaign has new relevance with the recent observation by the GraceKennedy Group executive, David Crum-Ewing, that Jamaica’s agriculture lags behind its regional peers, and the reasons he gave for this. Soil management was among them.

“Soil is what grows our products and I don’t think Jamaica and the agricultural sector understand the importance of managing the soil and the impact the soil has on your crops,” Mr Crum-Ewing, a business development executive at GraceKennedy’s Food and Services Division, said at a seminar on agricultural opportunities in Jamaica.

LITTLE USE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

But it isn’t only the soil that’s the problem. There is generally too little use of science and technology in farming. Farmers grow crops with third and fourth planting material. They use inappropriate pesticides and fertilisers and they employ inappropriate planting techniques.

“When I see Costa Rica producing an acre of Scotch bonnet peppers – 44,000 pounds, and in Jamaica we are producing 18,000 pounds per acre, it is ridiculous,” Crum-Ewing said, “Jamaica should own Scotch bonnet. Scotch bonnet originated in Jamaica.”

Implicit in Mr Crum-Ewing’s observation, as it was in Mr Brooks’, is a call for a joined-up strategy for Jamaica’s economic growth and development. The environment is ripe for a serious conversation on the matter.

Agriculture accounts for eight per cent of Jamaica’s gross domestic product (GDP) and employs around 200,000 people. There is, as several analyses have shown, a strong correlation between growth in the agricultural sector and real GDP expansion.

There is, however, relatively little post-harvest value-added in Jamaica’s agricultural production. When agro-processing and related activities are taken into account, the sector, some estimates say, accounts for around 12 per cent of GDP, or less than half of some of its regional peers.

In other words, agriculture in Jamaica is largely primary production – a mostly low-skill, low-technology business, the vast bulk of whose workers are over the age of 50.

Yet, the island spends around US$1.1 billion on food imports, or approximately 17 per cent of all imports in 2022. A substantial portion of those imports is to help feed Jamaica’s more than two million stop-over vacationers.

For many years, industry analysts and agricultural policymakers have contended that a fifth, and up to quarter, of food imports could be replaced with domestic substitutes. Which potentially means diverting to the domestic economy as much as US$275 million (J$41.2 billion), which is now spent with foreign farmers and agro-processors.

REVERSING POLICIES

That, however, would require reversing policies that allocate the island’s “most fertile … A1 soil” (which is how the National Environment and Planning Agency describes the Bernard Lodge estate in St Catherine) for the building of cities. And it insists upon bringing to agriculture a young, educated workforce that uses modern technology to grow crops on relatively large farms, rather than small, uneconomic plots.

Implicit in this approach is the need for appropriately trained people, investing in supportive infrastructure such as irrigation systems, and allocating resources to research and development (R&D). Indeed, this applies to all sectors of the economy, if Jamaica is to translate the macroeconomic stability it has achieved over the past dozen years to robust growth and sustainable development. But it doesn’t just happen. It has to be planned and worked towards.

With respect to agriculture, the training institutions and academies, the foremost of which, presumably, are the College of Agriculture, Science and Education and The University of the West Indies, Mona, should be at the forefront of this discussion. Unfortunately, their voices have been relatively muted. That must change. Quickly.

The private sector, too, must be engaged in this conversation, building partnerships with the government and education/research institutions to enhance and expand training and drive R&D.