Dear Editor,

It is public knowledge that the agriculture sector in Jamaica is lagging behind global standards, therefore persons entrusted with its development should provide us with tangible solutions and not sound bites.

However, Don McGlashan, the director general in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, doesn’t seem to grasp this concept, instead of articulating his vision for the agricultural sector at a recent forum, he bemoaned its parlous state.

“Where is that leader to drive the industry, to give our farmers the tools and that knowledge base to make their production better and more efficient. The truth is, there needs to be somebody… there needs to be a coordination of all that we have spoken about today. There needs to be a driver, there needs to be a focal point to really bring this together,” he said.

The thinking of public officials like Mr McGlashan is so flawed. These people seem to believe that the solution to every problem is to create a czar, when it’s easier to reform our institutions. Since, he is so interested in transforming the agricultural sector, why doesn’t he follow our developed counterparts and recommend the creation of a world-class agriculture research institute? Small countries like New Zealand are punching above their weight in agriculture due to the ingenuity of their institutions in developing agro-technologies and new varieties of agricultural produce and Denmark’s Knowledge Centre for Agriculture provides a wide variety of services from IT consultancy to finance. However, in Jamaica, there is little interest to modernise our systems, since we care more about public relations than actual policies, we prefer czars who strongly believe that politicians owe them something, luckily for them the propagandists in the media are quite happy with the state of affairs and the masses are not interested.

Lipton Matthews

lo_matthews@yahoo.com