Editorial | Dairy and the economy

The Jamaican authorities should closely observe an emerging initiative between the Seprod Group and domestic, regional and international partners that could provide a model for research and innovation in agriculture and other sectors that might help lift the island out of its confinement of low productivity, low technology, low value-added and puny growth.

Put differently, this arrangement, which is part of the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) ambitious project to reduce its more than US$10 billion food import bill by 25 per cent by 2025, provides broad contours for what an industrial policy for Jamaica – which this newspaper has been advocating for – ought to entail.

If the project is successful, Seprod, a major manufacturer of food and commodities, and the English-speaking Caribbean’s and Jamaica’s largest dairy farmer (this year the company will account for just below half of Jamaica’s liquid milk production, than its usual 60 per cent), will enjoy greater certainty in feed supplies for its cattle, efficiently produced as part of the integrated operation with less reliance on unstable global supply chains. If all doesn’t go as planned, important lessons will nonetheless have been learned.

Success, though, would enhance not only Jamaica’s food security, but by extension CARICOM’s, thus contributing to meeting the community’s “25 x ’25” target, although next year’s target always seemed more aspirational than a hard deadline.

CARICOM’s leaders launched the initiative at their intersessional summit in Belize in March, 2022, at a time when global supply chains remained in turmoil in the early aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a soaring food prices because of the war between Russia and Ukraine, two of the world’s biggest suppliers of grains, seed oils and fertilisers.

Musson, a listed company controlled by P.B. Scott’s Musson Jamaica, operates factories and other businesses across the Caribbean. Among the things it does in Jamaica is dairy farming at Serge Island in Jamaica’s south-eastern parish of St Thomas. It also used to grow sugarcane for processing into sugar in the parish.

Seprod, however, is no longer in the sugar manufacturing business. Like most other sugar producers it couldn’t compete with producers like Brazil, India, countries in the Asia/Pacific region, as well as beet sugar manufacturers in Europe.

Recently, what sugarcane Seprod still grew at its St Thomas farms primarily fed its cattle. That, however, has not proved to be the most effective, efficient or economic way to provide nutrition to the animals, as Seprod’s CEO, Richard Pandohie, recently publicly acknowledged in comments about his company’s latest financial performance.

ANIMAL FEED SECURITY

Separately, animal feed security is part of CARICOM’s ‘25 x ’25’ project. Or, as Mr Pandohie told The Gleaner in a statement: “To improve food security for our people, we need to improve the food security for our animal feedstock.”

With respect to dairy, feed cost and availability, especially since the pandemic disruptions, “have weighed heavily on dairy operations”, he explained. But addressing the cost of feed, Mr Pandohie said, was “only part of the equation, as we need also to improve the productivity of feedstock and resilience to climate change”.

That is part of the context of Seprod’s involvement in a project, as a member of and working with the Caribbean Private Sector Organisation (CPSO) to experiment in growing varieties of sorghum in Jamaica for animal feed and human consumption. Guyana and Belize will be engaged in similar initiatives.

For this venture, the CPSO has a memorandum of understanding with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), which is based in Hyderabad, India.

ICRISAT, one of the initiatives of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), works extensively in Asia and Africa in crop/agriculture research and development.

On the grains and grass research project in the Caribbean, ICRISAT will also work with faculty of agriculture at the St Augustine, Trinidad campus of The University of the West Indies (UWI) as well as the College of Agriculture, Science and Education (CASE) in Jamaica. Obviously, the agriculture minister will also interface with the partners. In other words, this is a partnership between the public and private sectors as well as academia, engaging in applied research and innovation, which will hopefully be transformative for a sector whose output is less than a third of what it was more than three decades ago. However, as Mr Pandohie framed Seprod’s involvement in the project a turnaround “will not be achieved without a multi-stakeholder approach involving government, research centres of excellence, private sector and the public”.

DEMAND

Indeed, Jamaica’s demand is for over 50 million litres of milk or milk-equivalent annually. This year, it will produce under 20 per cent of that, or hardly more than 10 million litres. In the 1980s milk production was over 30 million litres. Last year Jamaica spent US$56 million (J$3.2 billion), around four per cent of its overall food import bill.

But the potential spinoff. The island imports around 4,500 tonnes of beef, much of that used in the tourism industry, which complains about the quality of domestic beef. That, experts say, has to do, in part, with the quality of feed used by and feeding practices employed by the domestic beef industry.

The feed project, therefore, would benefit domestic beef producers, and support Seprod’s move into the segment of the cattle business. But feed is not the only issue affecting cattle farmers, dairy and beef. There has been a decline in the genetic quality of the cattle developed by the celebrated Jamaican scientists over seven decades ago. That has to be addressed. Happily some work has begun, including at CASE.

There is great truth to Mr Pandohie’s observation: “COVID should have taught us that in a crisis, it is every country for themselves, and truthfully CARICOM is extremely vulnerable to a food crisis based on our high dependency on imports. Time is not on our side and we cannot afford to continue to work in silos.”

The case for an industrial policy is as loud and it is clear.