KINGSTON, Jamaica – The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining is to build rainwater retention ponds across the island to increase access to water by farmers, especially during periods of drought.

Portfolio Minister Floyd Green made the disclosure during a stakeholder engagement on the New FACE of Food initiative, held in Manchester recently

“One of the priorities of the Ministry for this year is to ensure that our highly productive areas have more access to water. The way we are doing that is to work with our farmers and our farmers’ groups to build our retention ponds so that when we get these bouts of intense rainfall, we maximise the opportunity by capturing that water and using that water to carry us through periods of drought,” Green said.

The Minister noted that capturing rainwater will assist farmers in staying productive year-round.

“We have done it with great effect on former bauxite lands and we have seen that throughout the drought last year, a greenhouse cluster was able to still produce because we turned what was a bauxite pit into a pond, and as such, we had water to bring them through,” Green informed.

He also noted that Manchester has many old storage tanks that were built decades ago and are not being utilised.

“I’ve said to the National Irrigation Commission and to the Rural Agricultural Development Authority, let us do an analysis of these tanks, let us repurpose these tanks, put them back into operation, put small irrigation systems on them and use them,” he said.

-JIS