One of the most comedic moments in Parliament was when our affable Minister of Agriculture Roger Clarke declared in one of his presentations, “When di banana tree dem down a St Mary hear seh storm a come, dem just go lay down even before it reaches.” Citing that our banana cultivation can never withstand heavy winds from tropical storms or hurricanes.

He was right then. If he were still with us today he would also be correct.

Over the years, the Jamaican agricultural sector has suffered from the ravages of flooding from heavy rains, tropical storms, and hurricanes. In fact, over the last two decades, if we listened to various ministers of agriculture and fisheries and technocrats from the Rural Agricultural Development Agency (RADA), Jamaica has experienced at least $200 billion in losses from extreme weather.

Between 2004 and 2017 our agricultural sector suffered $196 billion in losses from weather-related events. Moreover, between 2006 and 2016, agriculture absorbed more than 23 per cent of the total damage and losses caused by natural disasters.

In October 2020, Minister of Agriculture Floyd Green announced that significant sustained rains caused over $2.5 billion in damage.

In 2022, RADA lamented extensive damage to crops and livestock in St Mary and Portland as a result of heavy rains during the period January 31 to February 1, at approximately $76.8 million, affecting more than 551 farmers. Eight months later, Tropical Storm Ian hit, and the damage to the sector caused by flooding was more than $200 million.

In 2023, rain for only two days created $274 million worth of damage. Livestock farmers suffered $25 million in losses, crops at about $173 million, and the farm work network at $64 million.

The recent passage of Hurricane Beryl indicates that this sector has suffered again with over $1 billion in damage.

“We have seen about 85 per cent of our banana and plantain lines go down in Portland and St Mary, but when you come to the southern parishes, our vegetable lines and tubers such as cassava [were mainly impacted]. We have seen a lot of damage to fruit trees — ackee, breadfruit, and, unfortunately, there was significant damage to our greenhouse farmers.” (Minister of Agriculture Floyd Green, July 8, 2024)

Undoubtedly, the pattern of our weather systems due to climate change has repeatedly wreaked havoc and devastation. Our farmers lose their produce, land, and income, significantly displacing them. It is only going to get worse.

On July 20, 2021, the minister of agriculture and fisheries launched the GK Insurance Weather Protect Scheme, a crop insurance policy explicitly developed for farmers and fishers. The GK Weather Protect provides coverage to farmers and fishers for losses from heavy rain, hurricane winds, and drought by farmers and fishers signing up for policies as the coverage with payments as “low as $5,700 per season”.

In December 2023, 27 farmers insured under the GK insurance weather scheme and, impacted by heavy rains, received payouts amounting to $675,000.

“What we need is more farmers to sign up…” (Floyd Green, December 5, 2023)

But should crop insurance be mandatory for registered farmers and fisherfolk, given all the predictions on climate change? If we say yes, then is this the best model to encourage our farmers to register?

Ghana has updated its crop insurance programme, giving farmers payouts when their harvests come up short or from falling into poverty when natural disasters like drought or heavy rains hit them.

In 2021, the Ghana Agricultural Insurance Pool (GAIP), a group of 15 insurance providers, compared historical farm yields to actual harvest data to verify insurance claims that enrolled farmers made.

Studies conducted and published in the BioMed Central journal showed that 90 per cent of small-scale farmers agreed that crop insurance was helpful, but less than one-fifth said they signed up for it. Furthermore, more than half of Ghana’s farmers said they lacked knowledge about insurance, and approximately 5 per cent said it was too expensive.

This is perhaps why when GAIP first introduced crop insurance to Ghanaian farmers in 2011 data showed that it was difficult to convince their farming population to take advantage of it as a result of misunderstanding about how insurance worked, in particular a distrust as to how the insurance companies calculated the payouts.

Now, with the upgraded system, the agriculture ministry uses satellite data to project how much each farmer could produce per acre and compare the data to the actual harvest when their agricultural relationship officers visit any farm making a claim.

Using this data and technology to track the weather systems, the Ghanaian authorities are confident that it will build a more resilient sector due to climate change in an economy where more than half its population relies on farming.

It has also sewn seeds of trust with Ghanaian farmers, especially when they are shown first- hand that agricultural damage can be predicted and measured.

For example, rising temperatures have caused Ghana’s northern region to become drier as they no longer have the usual two rainy seasons of the past but, instead, one five-month-long wet season, which has flooded crops, leaving the rest of the year dry, making anything that survived parched and dried up.

Here at home, we love to throw around slogans that really have not amounted to any real solutions — “Food security” and “Eat what you grow and grow what you eat” come to mind. However, achieving these goals for is impossible without the proper planning to offset the back-to-back damages to the sector we perennially face.

Agriculture, is the largest employer of labour with over 200,000 farmers. It is unclear how many of these farmers have crop insurance. Don’t you think it is time we have a full scale revolutionary approach to this sector? We have one of the best food taste profiles globally. Yet, we have not invested or truly incentivised the industry.

Perhaps if farmers saw our commitment to building this sector in the same way we have tourism and the business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors, they would feel compelled.

Farming, although essential to our lives, is not easy. Therefore, we have a duty to protect our farmers at all costs. Could a possible solution be to out a one per cent agricultural insurance fee on all agricultural inputs such as fertiliser, pesticides, tools, and agricultural capital goods for the fee to be used for an insurance premium covering our farmers? Perhaps the only cost to the farmers could be a registration fee of $1,000 per acre under coverage?

In the meantime, I await the subsequent announcement of the agricultural losses, seeing that this hurricane season is predicted to be vicious and busy.

Lisa Hanna is Member of Parliament for St Ann South Eastern, People’s National Party spokesperson on foreign affairs and foreign trade, and a former Cabinet member