MOST popular home-grown crops remain largely underexploited by Jamaicans, resulting in the country having missed out on excellent opportunities to rake in lots of hard currency from the international market, says the Scientific Research Council (SRC).

Among the crops that the SRC cited were sorrel, gungo peas, avocado pear, lemon grass and jack fruit.

“I think we need to have a realisation that when you talk about gungo peas and other agricultural products we are not the only ones in the world who use them and quite often they are used in very different ways and quantities,” SRC chairman James Moss-Solomon said yesterday during the Observer’s weekly Monday Exchange meeting of reporters and editors.

To support his claim, Moss-Solomon stated that sorrel is used much more per capita in Mexico than in Jamaica and because the Chinese ethnic cooking habits consume jack fruit in abundance, there is a big market for the product in Asian countries. He added that US-based company Goya Foods, which turns over some US$700 million annually, has made a fortune off gungo peas by selling it predominantly to the Latin American market.

“I think we are deficient in our consideration and understanding of branding,” said Moss-Solomon of Jamaicans.

“We shouldn’t just think about Jamaica as the be all and end all like we alone eat avocado pear, for example,” he added, noting that avocado pear is a popular side order in the Dominican Republic.

Lemon grass is clearly a plant for which the SRC has high hopes, particularly to be processed into tea and personal care products.

The medicinal industry of which lemon grass is a part is worth US$87 billion.

“People are becoming more heath conscious and so we did some market scoping, and what we found is that there is high demand for essential oil and local herbal medicinal plants’ extract and value-added products that you can develop from them,” said Roselyn Fisher, general manager of Marketech Limited, the marketing and business development arm of the SRC. “So, our thrust right now at the SRC is to see how we can resuscitate the local essential oil industry and we want to focus on lemon grass as one of the areas we want to jump-start as part of the process.”

To this end, the SRC is using its position, as the Government agency which provides support to the agro-industrial sector through scientific studies, to urge Jamaicans to explore the production of these crops to create value-added products for exports.

“We think of lemon grass, for example, as some common thing out there but not as an ingredient in Elizabeth Arden cologne or one of those fancy items out there,” said Moss-Solomon. “So what we are trying to get an awareness for is that the value of it is not necessarily just in the raw materials but it’s in the uses.”

The SRC provides technical assistance for those wishing to use local resources and develop formulations for value-added products. The SRC noted that some producers have indeed taken advantage of the opportunity and have made inroads in the export market. Two such companies are food processors CANCO and West Best, which purchased a gungo peas formulation developed by the SRC.

“We did a whole line of both red peas and gungo peas soup that’s now in the export market thanks to persons we transferred the technology to who have now commercialised it,” said Dr Audia Barnett, SRC executive director.

Jamaica’s non-traditional exports were valued at US$940 million in 2008 compared to US$650 million in 2007.