Jamaican farmers have seen a strong start to 2025, earning $40 million in the first two months of the year through the Agri-Linkages Exchange (ALEX) portal, an e-commerce platform designed to connect them directly with buyers in tourism, gastronomy, agro-processing, and retail.

The figure was disclosed by Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett at the Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee Festival’s Farmers’ Trade Day, held at the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech) in Kingston on February 28.

The early earnings set the stage for a record-breaking year, following a successful 2024 in which 2,000 farmers registered on ALEX supplied 4.3 million kilograms of produce valued at $452.8 million to Jamaica’s tourism industry. So far in 2025, farmers have supplied 81,000 kilograms of produce through the platform, with expectations that last year’s performance will be easily surpassed.

“We are going to be well over half a billion dollars of produce before the year reaches halfway if we continue at this rate, because we’re expanding and we’re growing,” Bartlett stated, underscoring the rapid scale-up of the programme.

The ALEX portal, launched in 2017 as a joint initiative of the Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF) and the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA), was designed to streamline supply chains by reducing reliance on middlemen and boosting direct farmer-to-buyer transactions. The platform allows farmers to list their available produce, while buyers—including hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, and agro-processors—can place orders based on real-time supply availability.

Bartlett highlighted that the growth of the Tourism Linkages Network is central to the Government’s strategy to increase local agricultural production and reduce import dependency. He pointed to ongoing initiatives to enhance farming efficiency and resilience, particularly in water harvesting and climate-smart agriculture, as key factors in sustaining the sector’s expansion.

“We’re looking at new innovative ways of enabling larger and higher levels of production and far more cost-effective operations for our small farmers,” the minister said, noting the Government’s commitment to scaling up agricultural output to meet growing demand from the hospitality and food industries.

ALEX’s Project Coordinator Candice Constantine has urged more farmers to register for the platform, noting that it provides them with direct access to large-scale buyers at no cost.

“Those buyers include some of our hotels, restaurant owners, tour operators, persons within the gastronomy market, agro-processors, supermarkets… you name it. ALEX is here to facilitate those connections,” Constantine explained.

She stressed that the platform not only increases market access but also provides backend support through agri-brokers who assist farmers with sales logistics, helping them navigate transactions and reduce post-harvest losses.

“You get greater market access to multiple buyers across Jamaica. You get agri-brokers on the backend assisting you with the connections, and ALEX also encourages local distribution and a reduction in importation. We want to get less losses within the agricultural sector. So, no farmer should be complaining about spoiled produce when you have ALEX here to assist you in finding buyers,” she added.

With a surge in demand from the hospitality and food processing industries, Jamaica’s domestic agriculture sector is under pressure to ramp up output. The Government’s push to integrate local farmers more deeply into the tourism supply chain aligns with broader economic goals of import substitution and food security.

— Karena Bennett