Gov’t Continues to Recraft the Agricultural Sector

The Government continues to recraft Jamaica’s agricultural sector to deal with the realities of climate change, Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining, Hon. Floyd Green, has said.

He noted that the Ministry is focused on several strategic pillars to improve the sector, including food security, agribusiness development and climate-smart technologies.

“We must farm differently. If the climate [has] changed, we cannot use the same approach that we used 10, 15 even five years ago. So, it’s about how we infuse more climate-smart technology into agriculture, how do we do more training of our farmers,” the Minister stated.

He was addressing day one of the Food Hygiene Bureau’s International Conference on the Impact of Climate Change, at the Cardiff Hotel and Spa in Runaway Bay, St. Ann, on Tuesday (October 24).

The conference brought together speakers from the Caribbean, India, the United States, Philippines and Singapore, among other countries, to address issues and challenges with climate change, traditional food systems, how the sustainable development goals will be achieved and what this will mean for the region.

Minister Green described the conference as “critical”, noting that there is an undeniable relationship between food security and climate change.

“We spent a lot of time in the past arguing about whether there is a relationship between them. Thankfully, our farmers have long recognised that the climate has changed and that we are living in a new reality, a new paradigm in relation to our weather patterns,” he further stated.

Mr. Green noted that while Jamaica’s production had rebounded from the downturn in market during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, this year’s out-turn is down by some 10 per cent due to unpredictable weather conditions.

“All of us have seen that impact, especially on our vegetable [crop] lines, as well as areas such as yam production [and] some of our [other] starches. We have seen downturns almost across [all] our agricultural sector, and that is because we still live in a very vulnerable agricultural society where most of our farmers operate open-field farms with limited access to water,” he said.

The two-day conference concluded on Wednesday (October 25).