Growth & Jobs | Agriculture ministry ramps up fruit tree planting

Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining Floyd Green is encouraging farmers to plant more fruit trees, particularly ackee and breadfruit, to meet local and overseas demand and replenish crops lost during Hurricane Melissa.

“We’re on a drive to expand our fruit trees, especially ackee and breadfruit. Clearly, ackee is our second-largest export. We’re seeing tremendous demand for it, and coming from Hurricane Melissa, we would have lost a lot of ackee trees, especially in the west. As such, we are saying to all the farmers, especially in the east, in hills like St Andrew, to go into ackee and breadfruit production,” he said.

Theminister, who was speaking during the opening of the Lime Edge Farm Road in Mount Friendship, St Andrew, on Wednesday , February 11, said that the fruit-tree planting initiative also involved the cultivation of avocado.

He noted that 1,500 trees from the Dominican Republic are being introduced locally through partnership with international organisation Trees That Feed Foundation. They are being distributed to farmers islandwide.

“One of the pluses of these avocados is that they bear right around the year, and we know there’s a tremendous demand, so what you will see over the next year is a massive focus from the Ministry of Agriculture on fruit trees and our fruit-tree programme,” he said. Meanwhile, the minister encouraged the farmers in rural St. Andrew to attend training sessions organised by the Rural Agricultural Development.

“It’s not all about fertiliser and seeds ... . We are ramping up our training especially for the farmers in our hilly terrain where ... we’re seeing higher temperatures, so you have to change the ways you farm,” he said.

He noted that there were also programmes for coffee farmers.

“We are moving to give our coffee farmers some new planting material because at the end of the day, if you have your plants for 20 years, they can’t be producing like they used to produce, so it is time to replant,” he noted.

Coffee seedlings may be accessed through the Jamaica Agricultural Commodities Regulatory Authority. The ministry intends to distribute some 60,000 seedlings in the coffee-growing areas.