Last Thursday, after 18 months and 28 sessions across the island, the organisers and sponsors declared it a success and hailed the fact that the project was done with efficiency.

“We are proud to say that all regional programmes were completed dead on time,” said Robert Reid, project specialist at the Jamaica office of the Inter-American Institute for Co-operation on Agriculture (IICA).

But beyond the technical talk and the formality of the function at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, there was a human side to the statistics. For more than 500 women, mainly from rural Jamaica, it has meant developing their skill in some area of agriculture or agro-industry. They were part of an IICA project, mostly funded through the Caribbean Regional HRD Programme for Economic Competitiveness (CPEC) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

The project’s aim is twofold: to enhance the employment and income-earning capacity of women, who have a higher jobless rate than men, and to encourage rural stability and development.

“We targeted 602, but touched 502,” said Reid.

According to Reid, the women who participated in the programme were trained in skills such as pig farming, organic farming, food safety, business and financial management and poultry and egg farming.

First secretary in the Canadian High Commission Vivian Monteith said the Canadians considered such projects important, given the increasing erosion of trade preferences enjoyed by countries like Jamaica with the advent of the World Trade Organisation and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

In this new environment, small producers will have to compete with larger producers in developed countries.

“We need the technical know-how to improve economic competitiveness,” Monteith said.

He said CIDA believed in helping Jamaica to develop the capacity of its people through training, understanding as it does social difficulties which made some people, “especially rural women”, more vulnerable.

IICA representative in Jamaica Hector Barreyro said the organisation was pleased to be associated with the project, which should help Jamaica to become more competitive in agriculture.

He said participants now have to help themselves to become economically independent.

Thomas Burton, a deputy director who represented the Rural Agricultural Development Agency, which also supported the project, pointed out that apart from training women in agricultural skills, it had also trained trainers – four of them, two of whom would be instructors when the next round of training begins.

Jamaica Agricultural Society president Senator Norman Grant noted the importance of such programmes to rural development in which agriculture had a critical part to play.

Grant said that rural communities account for 49 per cent of Jamaica’s population and this was an important point to consider when thinking about development strategies.