DENBIGH, Clarendon — An additional $60 million has been allocated to the country’s drought mitigation programme, with a focus on local farmers.

Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining, Floyd Green gave a breakdown of where the funds will be channelled.

“[About] $20 million of that will go to trucking of water for our farmers. But the bigger portion is to provide storage and drip irrigation support to our farmers and also to work on building catchment ponds. When you are in this dry period, we get a bout of shower and it goes to waste and we don’t want that. And so we are on a drive now to build retention ponds with our farmers and community groups so they can be prepared to face these increases in dry temperatures,” he said Saturday at the 72nd staging of the annual Denbigh Agricultural Industrial and Food Show in Clarendon.

Green said his ministry has started preparations in keeping with warnings from the Meteorological Service of Jamaica.

“Based on the trajectory from the Met Office, we are starting our mitigation preparations now; we don’t want to wait until we are in the height of the drought to start providing support for drought. As such, as outlined in Parliament during my sectoral debate, there is a $149-million drought mitigation programme helping the farmers, to provide some trucking, providing some mulch, providing some drip. We are in the heights of drought and it gives us an opportunity to look at what we have done so far, look at where we are, and determine what more needs to be done to ensure our farmers can make it through this time. Today, I am pleased to announce that we are going to add an additional $60 million to our drought mitigation programme,” he said.

Full prohibition orders for water usage,will likely take effect on August 10 as the country reels from prolonged dry conditions that are expected to stretch into October this year.

Caleigh Boyd, who was representing her mother and owner of Izelena, Garthia Downie-Boyd, explains the company’s process of making sauces and seasonings to Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining Floyd Green (centre) and president of the Jamaica Agricultural Society Owen Dobson during a tour of the Youth in Agriculture Village on Saturday, August 1 at the 72nd staging of the Denbigh Agricultural, Industrial and Food Show in May Pen, Clarendon. (Photo: JIS)

Speaking during a July 30 media briefing, Met Services’ principal director Evan Thompson said as at the end of June the parishes of St Elizabeth, St James, St Ann, and St Mary “were determined to be experiencing drought conditions”. He said the parishes of Manchester and St Catherine “were both basically on the borderline, in that they were just about moving toward drought conditions”.

“It’s most likely that having not experienced significant rainfall during the month of July, that situation would have been worsened. We should be seeing that drought conditions at least would have extended to these two parishes. That’s what we’re expecting to pick up after the month of July has ended, as we begin to gather and collate and compare our data,” Thompson told members of the media.

He noted that the projections did not mean there would be “no rainfall” at all for the island, but that “the number of incidents of rainfall will be fewer”, influenced by the El Nino phenomenon which has caused “lesser than normal amounts of rainfall and higher than normal temperatures” over the past few months.

“However, we could have a bulk of rainfall that is intense, and so we could have very small areas that experience maybe even flooding events in small areas as these systems develop and as they continue to affect us, but generally we will experience dry conditions,” Thompson explained further.