The Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries - Jamaica

THE MINISTRY OF INDUSTRY, COMMERCE, AGRICULTURE AND FISHERIES – JAMAICA BVM: So then what is the ac- tual mandate of your new ‘super’ Ministry? Shaw: “The primary role of this Ministry is to ensure that we are aggressively promoting investment and that we create as much value-added as pos- sible in the country. In other words, if you recognize where we’re coming from, we were, basically, a producer of com- modities - like sugar. And what we have not had enough of in this country is what you call the ‘practical integration’ from what you grow in the ground to what you process via an agricultural processing industry; not only the satisfaction of local con- sumption but to export surplus- es abroad. This is my mission now: in this for age of less consumption of sugar, we have to rationalize the sugar industry and rationalize the land usage. There is far too much land that has been appropriated for sugar and is now idle. So we have to get those lands into production in other areas. “We also have to diversify our production base and make sure we are feed- ing ourselves with freshly grown produce and feeding the record number of tourists who are coming to our land. Far too many planes are carrying in the food to feed them, when we can feed them, here. And then, we need to target the export markets of the CARICOM region, for which we have duty-free entry. And then, of course, our fourth target would be the Jamai- can Diaspora, in places like Canada, the Unit- ed States, and England. These are all markets waiting for what we can produce fresh and what we can process into durable goods for sale.And then, one more critical market: the feeding of our school children; 80 percent of what we are using to feed them,we are importing from abroad– flour and rice.” BVM: What products can replace sugar? Shaw: “There’s a wide range of things that are credible alternatives to sugar cane and can grow on sugar cane land.We have thousands of acres of land to produce things like pumpkins and sweet potatoes – these are things, by the way, that are much more nutritious than the almost synthetic-like flour that we get here. One of the processes has shown us pumpkin puree that you can can in five and ten gallon containers then sell it in bulk to the hotels or send it in bulk to the schools so that they can make pumpkin soup - no sugar added. Yet, if you taste the pumpkin puree grown in Jamaica, you’d swear that sugar was added to it. “Other things include beans for castor oil; Sea Island cotton, for which there is an insatia- ble demand in Europe; other industrial crops like mangoes.We’ve just gotten an agreement with the United States to export mangoes once they’ve been treated by radiation. So now, we have to encourage the development of more