With forecasters predicting no rainfall for St Elizabeth until May, Linton Dixon is a worried man. Already, he has written off most of his tomato crop as a loss. His water-starved sweet peppers are dying, too, and he has little hope for the acres of carrots he planted.

If nature proves the meteorologists wrong, Dixon’s four-week old tomato seedlings may be his much-needed lifeline. But that is only if, by some divine intervention, his farmlands in Lover’s Leap get a good shower of rain from above.

“We hope for the best; that is, we hope the weatherman is wrong,” Dixon told the Sunday Observer last week. “If there is no water, all the crops will die.”

Nearby, John and Babsy Burton have grown accustomed to the sight of acres of dried-up, rotten tomatoes – the result of an inability to find a market for the crops that manage to survive the drought.

“Sixty per cent of what we planted died and the rest got no rainfall, so the best thing is to leave them to rot because we can’t pay people to pick these,” John said.

Last Wednesday, sections of the island, including Manchester, received scattered showers; but according to the Meteorological Service, no “appreciable rainfall” is in sight for St Elizabeth until May.

In fact, the parish – considered to be the breadbasket of the island – has received no rainfall since Hurricane Ivan battered the island with 120-mile-per-hour winds and buckets of rain last September. Those who live there say the current drought is the worst they have seen since 1968. Then, they were water-starved for nine months.

“We (expect to) see no appreciable showers until the end of April to May,” said the Meteorological Service’s Clifford Mahlung.

St Elizabeth receives, on average, 1,838 millimetres of rainfall every year, he explained. It is the island’s sixth wettest parish. However, the northern section of St Elizabeth is wetter than the southern areas.

With the ongoing drought has come bush fires.

For almost two weeks in mid-February, one such fire raged through several farm districts, devouring hundreds of acres of forested lands, crops and guinea grass. A few buildings were damaged while others had near misses.

According to the Rural Agricultural Development Agency (RADA) parish representative, Howard Hinds, the fire destroyed a total of 400 hectares of land, 200 hectares of which were non-farmland.

He said farming was being done on 70.5 hectares of the burnt-out area. Included in that was 56 hectares of guinea grass – an important component of the planting process – while the rest of the land was being used for agricultural crops like watermelons, tomatoes, thyme, escallion and gungo peas.

“All in all, there was a lot of bush on the slope,” he told the Sunday Observer.

And while his estimates are substantially less than the original picture that was being painted of massive losses sustained by farmers, some growers have really been hard hit.

Among those are the residents of the farming districts in Ballards Valley.

“My three acres of gungo is gone,” said Carl Morais, whose four-bedroom house was just barely spared from the flames.

The fire, which raged on the hillside from Ballards Valley to miles away in Lover’s Leap, made a semi-circle around his house, burnt his curtain and a piece of board outside in his yard.

Morais said his home was saved simply because of the efforts of residents like Deen Elliot who used his private resources to help fight the blaze.

The parish’s fire department was alert but hampered by the lack of piped water in the parish, community members said. That is a problem that they have grown accustomed to as, over the years, they have had to buy water from trucks – a costly practice for farmers.

As they waited and prayed for rain last week, they counted their losses.

Lenworth Banton said he lost a few acres of sweet pepper, escallion and tomato; Ettie Bloomfield – 25 acres of guinea grass and approximately six acres of vegetables; Verna Senior and Valerie Brown together lost nearly 15 acres of guinea grass. They are just some of the farmers who said they lost crops and are now looking to the government for help.

The cause of the fire has still not been confirmed, but there are persistent reports that it began along the beachfront, several miles away from the farmlands that have been ravaged. There have also been reports that the fires, lit by farmers as they prepared their land for planting, got out of control and spread quickly through the rain-starved vegetation.

Whatever the source of the fires, environmentalists are concerned about the result. The flames destroyed important forested areas and have also contributed to the further depletion of the ozone layer, they said.

“The more we burn, the more we affect the ozone layer,” explained Dr Grace Turner, the public education and corporate communications manager at the National Environment Planning Agency (NEPA).

“This contributes to the whole greenhouse effect, it impacts on the flora and fauna and on the delicate ecosystem we take for granted,” she noted.

Peter Espeut agreed.

“It is not so much the fire damage that is the problem, it is the carbon dioxide that is released,” the environmentalist told the Sunday Observer.

“The carbon dioxide contributes to global warming. Although we can’t see it, the impact is significant.”

The land will suffer too, he said, as the absence of forested areas contributes heavily to the lack of rainfall.

“That, in itself, is a big environmental issue; forested areas attract rain,” Espeut said.

“Burning impacts on wildlife such as birds, snakes, frogs and other animals. and when the area is burnt out there will be no food for them so they can no longer live there.”

NEPA is pushing the use of best practices in farming – no wide-scale cutting down of trees and no burning.

“Without trees, there will be no rainfall. there is a link between rainfall and forestation,” Dr Turner noted.

While the environmentalists preach best practices, the farmers have to contend with the reality they face now.

“It’s a trying time for us,” said Clarett Smith who, along with her son Richard, was planting squash at their Lover’s Leap farm last week.

“Everyday we look to the hills, but so far nothing has happened,” she said of her anticipation of a downpour.

Linton, in the meanwhile remains hopeful that the weatherman will be proven wrong. “We have to just hope and pray that something will happen soon,” he said, as he picked through his tomatoes in a storeroom at the back of his Lover’s Leap home, hoping that one of his regular customers would pass by.