KINGSTON, Jamaica— Minister of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries, Audley Shaw, on Wednesday, officially handed over the refurbished seed bank at the Bodles Research Station in St Catherine.

The facility will identify, preserve and store climate-resilient crop varieties for the local and regional agricultural sectors.

Renovation of the seed bank was undertaken as part of a Caribbean-wide pilot programme for climate resilience, which is being carried out over a five-year period from 2015 to 2020, through grant funding of US$10.39 million from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Similar facilities are being built in Haiti, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and St Lucia.

Shaw said that the seed bank has been retrofitted to allow for testing, extraction, cleaning, treating and storage of seeds at the highest standard.

“It is a project that will make a fundamental contribution to plant health and plant production because good seeds and good planting material are essential to agricultural production,” he noted.

He said that the seed bank will enable Jamaica to expand its seed-producing capacity and allow for faster recovery of the agricultural sector in the event of natural disasters, as material will be more readily available for replanting.

“Another key benefit of this one-of-a-kind facility in the Caribbean is that we will be able to preserve both our local and regional biodiversity, which is important to the sector’s sustainability,” the minister added.

IDB Country Representative, Therese Turner-Jones, in her remarks, said that the entity’s support is aimed at strengthening the resilience of the region’s agricultural sector against climate change.

—JIS