SANTA Cruz, St Elizabeth – Arguing that farming at all levels must be run as a business to be sustainable, Agriculture Minister Christopher Tufton says farmers need to understand the importance of consistency in production and pricing.

Addressing a St Elizabeth Homecoming Foundation agricultural exposition at the Sharon Baptist Church Hall in Santa Cruz recently, Tufton said farmers had to get away from the traditional expectations flowing from the chaotic cycles of shortages and gluts that have long dominated the sector.

“Because the farmer is accustomed to gluts and shortages, he believes that he should get the highest possible price (during the shortage period) as buffer for the periods of over-production when prices tumble,” Tufton said.

His ministry, he said, was working to help farmers to understand “what the market wants” as part of the drive to reduce the effects of the shortage/glut cycle. Also, efforts to improve post-harvesting practices through the building of packaging and storage facilities and the use of state-of-the-art transportation would help to improve the situation.

But crucially too, there had to be an effort by agricultural producers to calculate their true costs of production and abide by “best practices” in order to arrive at a fair price to consumers, Tufton said.

“Farmers must know their costs of production, you must know that if you do it this way (using best practice), which is the right way, you will get better yields and you must so manage your product once you reap it to minimise the spoilage and to sell it for a reasonable price,” the minister said.

Tufton said that in the not-too-distant future, farmers would have no choice but to be more business-like in their approach since the planned expansion of modern packaging and storage houses around the country would inevitably serve to stabilise market prices.

“It (more stable prices) is going to happen whether you like it or not,” he said.

He cautioned also that world trading arrangements to which Jamaica was a party, meant that local farmers had to remain price competitive or find themselves being squeezed by imported produce.

“We (Jamaican Government) can adjust trade policies within the bounds of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) to give you some amount of support and protection. but understand what we can’t do, we can’t preserve or protect inefficiency,” said Tufton. “It’s not sustainable to guarantee you high prices with no bearing or reflection on what it is actually costing to produce the product.”

However, noting that agriculture directly employed some 230,000 people and supported well in excess of one million, Tufton said the society needed to appreciate the need for greater and more sustainable linkages to expand agricultural production and value added.

“Can you imagine if more attempts were made to link agriculture to other critical sectors like tourism, like manufacturing, like the exporting of goods and services, like the airline and cruise shipping industries?” he asked. “If there was a more deliberate effort to link agricultural activity. to the school feeding programme, hospitals, can you imagine how better off the bulk of the population would be?”

There was need “to get a change in the mindset of all of us to adjust to what we can do a little bit better. A lot of times when the farmer is criticised for being unproductive, it is because the farmer is given basket to carry water – you expose the weaknesses without exposing the context”, he said.

“A farmer who has to compete in the context of a trade policy which sees imported subsidised produce on the same shelf as his own produce, is going to be marginalised and is going to appear to be less competitive. A farmer who does not have the support of his extension services is going to be marginalised,” the agriculture minister said.

He claimed that in the world’s industrialised countries “agriculture is viewed as a strategic imperative, not as a peripheral activity but a matter of national security”.