Invest in agriculture, Clarke urges private sector
Minister of Agriculture and Lands Roger Clarke yesterday urged local investors and members of the private sector to pump more money into the agricultural industry.
Speaking at the World Food Day National Ceremony and Exhibition at Ardenne High School in Kingston, Clarke announced a series of road shows, starting October 25, where private investors will be invited to form partnerships with different sectors within the industry.
“This is an opportunity to allow those people who speak about the potential of agriculture to put their money where their mouth is,” Clarke remarked.
According to Clarke, because the Ministry of Agriculture and its partners have consistently invested in the sector, this has led to “phenomenal” improvements in all areas.
He noted that this growth could be traced to the substantial injection of capital in strategically targeted areas of production; the provision of technical support to farmers in the use of production-enhancing technology, and the provision of irrigation systems to assist farmers to increase their productivity levels.
These factors, he said, resulted in improvements in production figures for the first two quarters of 2006.
“Based on the significantly increased yields in domestic food crop production in the first quarter of this year, the sector recorded growth of 20.4 per cent and this was outdone by the second quarter performance of 30.6 per cent,” said Clarke.
“We. recognised that in our mission to modernise the sector. we must seek to forge partnerships with private sector investors,” he added.
Meanwhile, Dr Dunstan Campbell, FAO representative in Jamaica, The Bahamas and Belize, also called for collaboration between the private and public sectors to improve the performance of the agricultural sector, thereby aiding in rural development.
“We went to have a development where we can see better results, and the only way we can achieve this is through collaboration and through planning together,” said Campbell.
He quoted statistics from the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), which said that 43 per cent of rural household income goes towards purchasing food and beverages.
“We are trying …to introduce systems where the food production in rural households can be increased so that a greater proportion of their income would go towards things like health and education,” Campbell remarked, adding that rural development was a major component of the FAO’s plan for poverty reduction.
The FAO assists the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands in policy formulation and at the field level where they focus on small community projects which are hampered by resource limitations.
In spite of the improvements in the agricultural sector, rural poverty and underdevelopment continues to be a sore point for the ministry.
The Statistical Institute of Jamaica’s (STATIN’s) Survey of Living Conditions presented in parliament in May 2006 showed that between 1999 and 2005 – despite an overall reduction in the national poverty levels from 16.9 to 14.8 per cent – poverty in rural Jamaica remained 6.3 percentage points higher than the national average.