KINGSTON, Jamaica — The People’s National Party (PNP) has called on the Office of the Contractor General (OCG) to investigate the establishment of a 15-acre demonstration plot of Mombasa dairy-feeding grass on the personal property of Minister of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries, Karl Samuda.

The party said the situation appears to be “an outright case of corruption or at least a blatant breach of public trust on the part of the agriculture minister”.Samuda, who is also known to be a dairy farmer, has admitted that the grass was planted on his property but this was after persuasion from Byron Lawrence, who currently serves as Acting CEO of the Jamaica Dairy Development Board (JDDB). The minister also said he offered to pay but there is no documentation of the offer.Lawrence has since come out in support of Samuda, admitting that he was the one who implored the minister to accept the offer and further stated that “the JDDB refrained from billing the minister because it was not a practice to bill farmers for similar assistance”.However, the PNP contends that Samuda sought to benefit personally from a project intended to assist poor farmers of the country.According to the Opposition, the trial project was set up specifically for small farmers to explore the potential of the produce as a critical component in the dairy industry, adding that “this kind of predatory behaviour by the person put in charge of overseeing the development of agriculture is not helpful to struggling farmers across the country”.Opposition spokesman on agriculture Dayton Campbell said in Parliament on Tuesday that the Dairy Board had agreed to only five acres being planted on the minister’s property, which in itself raises questions of ethics, due process and transparency. However, it was later discovered that 15 acres of grass is planted on the property with no approval for the additional ten acres, Campbell argued.The PNP said further information is that an additional 35 acres of grass was also allocated for planting on the minister’s Knollis property also without approval. The party also claimed that it is believed the Dairy Board CEO, who was recently dismissed from the position, had disagreed with the decision to allocate the additional 10 acres of grass to the minister’s farm. On learning of the additional acreage of grass, the former CEO also pulled the technical support team from the project, PNP said.