Green: Ignorance stymying export potential

The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining will be ramping up its public awareness campaign in order to address the confusion and ignorance among exporters about the potential for Jamaican products, Minister Floyd Green announced on Wednesday.

“I have found as minister, that a number of us are not sure what are the products, the crops that the world is really clamouring for; we do have some misconceptions. So some of us do know by now that yam is our number-one traditional export, but I am not sure that we are certain that there is a tremendous demand for dasheen, tremendous demand for coco, tremendous demand for ackees, and I could go on and on,” he told a post-Cabinet press conference at the Banquet Hall, Jamaica House.

“We believe that this is critical, in fact, fundamental to do a number of things. One, now more than ever, our farmers and fishers need to hear from us directly as we seek to increase the production of crops and livestock. We do have a number of initiatives under our new Face of Food strategy and we want to bring that directly to our stakeholders by sharing some of our new programme offerings across the ministry and its agencies. We are going to be listening to some of the issues that the farmers and fishers may bring up, Green added.

He pointed out that on Thursday, a stakeholder engagement focussing on exporters would have been held in St Andrew and on Friday the islandwide stakeholder’s engagement will continue at the Wembley Centre of Excellence in Halse Hall, Clarendon. Getting this information out is especially important in light of the new agro-parks set to come on stream, Green explained.

“We will be using the stakeholder engagements to hunt new investment opportunities. There are also a number of new offerings that came up over the last three years from the private sector, especially around things like insurance. Family health insurance, crop insurance and also new loans that have been offered by our financial services sector. We also want to bring that information to our farmers and fishers across Jamaica.”

November is being observed as Eat Jamaican Month in collaboration with the Jamaica Agriculture Society. Eat Jamaican Day will be on Saturday, November 24 with a range of activities planned for the College of Agriculture, Science and Education in Passley Gardens, Portland. There, a number of agricultural training institutions will host displays promoting the new Face of Food campaign which will run for at least the next six weeks.

CS