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

THE MINISTRY OF INDUSTRY, COMMERCE, AGRICULTURE AND FISHERIES – JAMAICA mango orchards. Jamaican mangoes are abso- lutely magnificent. “Sweet peppers, sweet corn, onions – a whole range of things, and cannabis. The government of Canada has freed up cannabis and now the world is recognizing, even the United States with all its resistance, that cannabis is emerg- ing as an appropriate medical alternative to the opioids that are killing off Americans and other people in the developed countries. “We have 45,000 acres of former sugar land in St. Catherine and Clarendon to be ratio- nalized. Right now, I’m sitting on hundreds of applications for thousands and thousands of acres of land by people who want to produce alternatives to sugar. It is nothing short of ex- citing– the new interest being shown. People want land to grow all kinds of things – cassa- va, for example. Our local beer company has made a decision to use less imported barley and, instead, use locally-produced cassava.We are growing more breadfruit trees. It’s a natu- rally-grown food for flour. The difference be- tween breadfruit flour and wheat flour is that the breadfruit flour is gluten-free. So is cassava flour. So, they’re both more healthy. “There’s bamboo and coconut. One of the largest exporters of coconut products into Can- ada is a Jamaican company. And yet they source no coconut rawmaterial from Jamaica; it comes fromThailand. Isn’t that ridiculous? We can grow coconuts anywhere in Jamaica. So,we’re going to ramp up coconut production.The list is endless in terms of the possibilities.And,we can reap crops two or three times a year because of the climatic conditions. If you look at castor beans–we can have three to four harvests in one year. “One of the things we have to do, though, is to ramp up the infrastructure support for large and small farmers – large and small irrigation systems, for instance.We have a grant of £52 million from the British government to develop two major irrigation schemes –one in the St. Elizabeth/Manchester area, called Essex Valley, and another one in the St. Catherine/Claren- don area, to put in modern irrigation systems. We also have a local irrigation manufacturing company that does small irrigation systems to fit the needs of small farmers. As a Member of Parliament from Manchester, I represent small farmers, who farm on the hillsides. Here is a smart approach for them: put your rain drums on the hillside, catch water into your drums, and have drip irrigation pipes, sold to them at reasonable prices, and you push those pipes into the hillside farms. Voila! Irrigation without electric pumps.” BVM: Once these various new crops are grown and harvested, what happens next? Shaw: “We have to get the infrastructure to support agri-processing into a mature and well-oiled arrangement so that farmers don’t suffer from fears of glut or drastic price move- ment, because that is what turns them off from production. So, I’m setting up a number of processing centers across the country. And these centers will store fresh produce that can be sold out into the market on a timely basis, or frozen and processed. That infrastructure is a