Editorial | ‘Mission Agriculture’

They already know the facts, but it would do no harm, and hopefully help, if Jamaican policymakers, including Prime Minister Andrew Holness, read and absorbed Alexis Bonte’s article in this newspaper on Monday.

Afterwards, Mr Holness should direct his agriculture minister, Floyd Green, to revamp his approach to the sector, starting on a mission that is obviously about driving farm production and enhancing Jamaica’s food security. This campaign has to be pursued with revolutionary zeal.

Concomitant with issuing Mr Green a new mandate, Mr Holness should freeze real estate developments on all agricultural lands, including those at Bernard Lodge, St Catherine, which the State’s National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) described as the island’s “most fertile …A1 soil”, but went on to give succour to the Government’s plan for a new city on the very plain. That idea is being expanded on by private developers who have been awarded permits to plant the Bernard Lodge soil with additional concrete.

Mr Bonte is the representative in Jamaica for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In Monday’s article, he promoted and highlighted an FAO conference next month on food security in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has greater significance given the region’s crisis of food insecurity and the initiative launched by Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders, two years ago, to slash the community’s US$5-billion food import bill by 25 per cent by 2025.

Jamaica accounts for about a fifth of what CARICOM spends on food imports. But while the island may be committed to doing its bit to achieve the region’s target, it is not this newspaper’s sense that there is any great mobilisation in support of the mission. The undertaking has not, it seems, been internalised and nationally owned.

Yet, as Mr Bonte pointed out, the region has cause for concern. For notwithstanding its achievements in reducing hunger (which spiralled at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic), an uptick in 2022, when undernourishment among the population of the wider Caribbean rose from 14.7 per cent to 16.3 per cent, served “as a stark reminder that the journey towards food security is far from over”.

PROBLEM MORE ACUTE IN JAMAICA

While the issue of food insecurity and insufficiency of nutrition are common among significant portions of the populations of all CARICOM members, the problem is more acute in Jamaica than most, although the island’s post-COVID record-low unemployment rate should be providing better insulation for more people.

In 2022, the last year for which full FAO data are available, more than six in 10 (60.6 per cent) of the population of the wider Caribbean faced moderate to severe food insecurity, up one percentage point on the previous year, but still 4.8 percentage points below 2020.

Of the people who faced food insecurity, nearly three in 10 (28.2 per cent) had severe problems: they ran out of food, faced hunger, or were forced to go for days without eating. In the Caribbean, 12.5 per cent of the population fell in that category in 2022.

But across the spectrum of food insecurity, moderate to severe, Jamaica, with more than half (54.4 per cent) of the population having difficulty accessing sufficient food, was behind only Haiti (approximately 83 per cent) with the problem. Further, nearly 63 per cent of Jamaicans could not afford a healthy meal in 2022, and in the three-year period between 2020 and 2022, an average 8.3 per cent were estimated to be undernourished, against 7.5 in the preceding triennium.

The pandemic, which disrupted global supply chains, followed by the Russia-Ukraine war, which reduced the export of grains and other agricultural commodities, helped to drive food inflation, exacerbating the problem of food insecurity. Geopolitical tension between the United States and China further locked in some of these issues, which have been further worsened by the tensions in the Middle East since last October’s terror attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s savage, retaliatory pummelling of Gaza.

There is now the prospect of a wider regional war.

On top of these are global warming and climate change, which already pose problems for agricultural output.

There are clear lessons in all of this for Jamaica and CARICOM: the Caribbean cannot extricate itself from global trading arrangements, but it can do better at feeding itself.

Or, as Mr Bonte framed it: “Jamaica, like its counterparts, faces unique vulnerabilities – limited arable land, exposure to extreme weather events and specific food security and nutrition challenges.”

This newspaper maintains its embrace of a regional approach to food security, including CARICOM’s vision of ‘25 by 25’, which, unfortunately, remains a leader-centric initiative, rather than one in which the region’s populations have been invited to share ownership.

Better technology

But Jamaica on its own has a strong logic for driving agriculture, which accounts for around eight per cent of the island’s GDP. That ratio could be higher if the sector employed better technology that drove efficiency and production and a greater proportion of farm output was taken to higher stages of processing.

Experts estimate that Jamaica could substitute between a fifth and a quarter of its food imports with domestic production, which would mean annual savings of between US$200 million and US$250 million, or up to J$40 billion in savings. Much of that money would be available for investing in the domestic/regional economy, including agriculture.

Yet, much of the island’s “most fertile…A1 soil” is being lost to agriculture for real estate, at a time when the ravages of climate change mean that it will require far greater acreages, up to a third by some estimates, to achieve an equivalent output.

Obviously, Jamaica needs a new conversation and new trajectory on agriculture.