PRESIDENT of Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS) Lenworth Fulton is calling for greater investment and more funding to be made available for the agricultural sector to boost productivity in crops that have fallen off significantly. He also reiterated the need for a dedicated agricultural fund.

“We actually lost citrus; cocoa production is at its lowest; avocado is at a very low level; coffee is not doing well; pimento is not doing well. Most of these crops need a lot of work and investment to get them back to former days,” Fulton said, also pointing to the major loss of the sugar cane crop over the years.

Speaking with the Jamaica Observer last Friday, Fulton lamented that these crops were once the largest source for agricultural production.

“It needs private investment; Government alone can’t do it. But it needs policy and incentive to get the private sector to come in and produce these crops again for the Jamaican people,” he said.

Fulton said he was particularly concerned about the fall-off in coffee production over the last several years.

“We have a world premier brand called Blue Mountain Coffee, and it’s difficult to get 200,000 boxes. We have seen 30, 40 years ago, we were doing 500,000 and odd boxes. We have fallen significantly below what we are used to,” he said.

Fulton says he believes that one of the main factors impeding the productivity of these crops is “we can’t get money in agriculture — plain and simple”.

“When you go to a bank to borrow money, they reject you as a farmer, they are not lending you any money. And if the money does come, it is getting to you at interest rates of 11/12 per cent. You can’t borrow money to do agriculture at that rate and that is why the Jamaica Agricultural Society over the last 40 years put on the table to develop an agricultural fund like the National Housing Trust, but this has been rejected,” he said.

He noted, however, that even though Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining Minister Floyd Green did mention that he was looking at the establishment of an agricultural development fund in his sectoral presentation last Tuesday, “he didn’t mention that it is the JAS that put that on the table, out of which grew one little fund called the Jamaica Development Dairy Board…but I sincerely hope that the minister and the Government will now look at a holistic agricultural fund”.

“You see all these cess that are being collected and going to places like JACRA [Jamaica Agricultural Commodities Regulation Authority], these cess should be put in one fund and each one of these [agricultural] entities would get their share, but you can’t spit it up into smithereens and expect that you’re going to have an impact. So I hope the policy directive will change to develop the fund so that we can get money from it,” Fulton said.

In his sectoral presentation, Green admitted that agriculture still requires significant investment, but “the reality that our financial sector is failing us”.

“Our farmers are still unable to access capital at competitive rates to drive their agricultural enterprises. This is why we want to work with the minister of finance to establish an agricultural development fund to see how we can use that to drive investment in agriculture. If our farmers get the capital, they will do the work,” he said.

In the meantime, commenting on the decline in coffee production, acting senior director for the Coffee Division of JACRA Patrick Pitterson told the
Observer that there are several contributing factors owing to this, not just financing.

“I agree that it is much less than last year, but the main reason for that is that we had the prolonged rains in late October/early November last year and unfortunately, we had that rain when you would’ve had the peak of the coffee riping. And so those factors caused a lot of the coffee to fall off the tree and that significantly affected this year’s crop [for Blue Mountain coffee] because we lost probably around 60,000 boxes as a result of that,” he said.

He noted as well that over the last two years, the coffee industry has also been faced with the issue of getting adequate labour for harvesting crops.

“The average picker is around 60 years old and they are mostly female and they are not being replaced. So you don’t have younger people wanting that because the compensation for that is minimal as against the terrain they have to work in. So it’s not attractive for younger people and then you have more people moving up in terms of personal development. There is more attractive work out there. For example… we have younger people gravitating towards the BPO [business process outsourcing] industry. You’re not going to get them to come into farming and especially picking/harvesting,” he said.

In terms of the High Mountain brand, Pitterson noted that the farmers have given up on many of those farms, mainly because of the high production costs.

“The production cost is similar to the production cost in the Blue Mountain. However, the price for a box of coffee in the High Mountain compared to the price of a box of coffee in Blue Mountain — the disparity is very wide, so it’s not really attractive based on the production cost. So you have a lot of those farms that have been [abandoned] over the years. So that significantly reduces the overall production of coffee,” he said.

In his sectoral presentation, Green had highlighted several initiatives the Government will be putting in place this year to help boost coffee productivity, including a $3.5-billion revitalisation and expansion programme.