Small potatoes!

Despite St Ann South East Member of Parliament Lisa Hanna’s claims that Irish potato production is uneconomic, leaving many farmers impoverished, an agricultural expert has countered that the market is profitable.

Hanna argued that the Christiana Potato Growers Cooperative Limited has never been able to survive independently without a government subvention to aid the production.

“Jamaicans pay among the highest food prices globally, whether locally grown or imported,” said Hanna, who accompanied Agriculture Minister Pearnel Charles Jr on a recent farm tour in St Ann and St Mary.

“Food security does not lie in a country’s food production but in its ability to finance food imports by exporting other goods and services,” she said in a Gleaner interview.

To increase the country’s global competitiveness, Hanna said that the Government - and specifically the Rural Agricultural Development Authority - needed to place greater focus on value-added export products in order to incentivise cultivation.

Such value-added products include pepper, ginger, coffee, mango, papaya, and ganja products.

“Jamaica will never make true prosperity for our three million people by just selling to our three million people,” she said.

“We must train our people with the skill sets and give them the incentives on the tools of the trade so they can invest in these niches. The global ganja or cannabis and pepper sauce markets are expected to reach US$97.3 billion and US$3.77 billion, respectively, by the end of 2026. To succeed in exporting any one of these products at even a one per cent world market share would transform Jamaica into the country we all yearn for.”

Hanna re-emphasised that many farmers were investing too much and reaping too little. She hopes that Jamaica will tap niche markets to create “true wealth” for its people.

However, Locksley Waites, agronomist at RADA, challenged Hanna’s claims, citing Irish potato cultivation as one of Jamaica’s most lucrative markets.

While agreeing that the investment cost is high for yields, Waites said that each plant has a minimum yield of 1.5lb. It takes approximately 12 weeks from planting to harvesting,

“So if you have a acre of potato and you have 17,000 plants at 1.5 pound, just do the maths!” he exclaimed, adding that the farm gate price of potato is $80 per pound.

“So you can recover your $700,000 and smile all the way to the bank,” he said.

Waites also said that the quality of Irish potato milk was on par with other varieties like oat, coconut, and almond.

Approximately 6,000 farmers have applied to RADA to get into the potato milk venture. Four thousand have been accepted, with the remainder searching for farmland.

Sixty per cent, or 2,400, of the 4,000 farmers, he said, are small farmers.

“Irish potato is the way to go ... . Just pray that the weather is good and you are in the money,” said the agronomist.

However, the major limitation that farmers face is that the potatoes are temperature sensitive. Because of Jamaica’s warm climate, farmers have to rely on the cooler months of December to February to plant and reap.

The international benchmark yield for potatoes is 16 tonnes per hectare (2.5 acres). Jamaica is currently averaging 15 tonnes per hectare, according to Waites.

“So we not doing bad. We just need to get up to national consumption, and once we get up to national consumption, we want to move on to export to CARICOM,” he said.

In April 2018, the then-agriculture minister, Audley Shaw, called on farmers to produce more Irish potatoes to meet the high demand of local fast-food restaurant operators in order to establish the country’s footing in the exportation market while also meeting local demand.

Agriculture Minister Pearnel Charles Jr told The Gleaner that while there is considerable potential to achieve such a goal, the trajectory of the ministry’s production investments must be based on empirical data. As a result, he stated that he will be guided by the market and demand.

“There is a high demand of Irish potato now. You’ll find that it doesn’t matter how many acres we have looked on today, they are all going to be sold,” he said.

However, there is still a need for diversification to move along the value chain in order to look at supplying French fries and other types of potato by-products, he said.

Charles said more work needs to be done on the Government’s end to see how it can reduce the national import bill and provide the necessary support in addressing the current concerns of farmers.

asha.wilks@gleanerjm.com