Head of Jamaica’s largest farmers association, Norman Grant says the rest of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) can draw on his country’s experience as the region continues to battle with its US$5 billion annual food import bill.
Norman Grant, president of the Jamaica Agriculture Society (JAS), an umbrella association of farmers, has noted that Jamaica, through its Grow What We Eat and Eat What We Grow Campaign has over the last decades made some progress in curbing the amount of money leaving the country to buy food overseas.
He told a session dubbed Sustainable and Profitable Value Chains in the Caribbean during Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA), taking place here this week, that developed countries celebrate the fact that they attained that status through agriculture.
Grant told regional stakeholders that the campaign, which was launched in 2003, appealed to Jamaica’s 2.7 million citizens and its more than 220,000 farmers.
“Our domestic crop production was somewhere in the region of just over 400,000 metric tonnes,” Grant said, telling participants, that just 10 years later, Jamaica has reduced its weighted average annual food import bill by US$60 million.
“And let’s do the maths because, by extrapolation, the campaign, the work of the farmers, has saved the Jamaican economy close to US$500 million,” he said, adding that domestic crop production has increased from 400 000 metric tonnes to over 600,000 metric tonnes.
Within a period of 10 to 12 years, Jamaica has increased its domestic crop production by 25 per cent.
“This means that the sector grew by a weighted average of two per cent per annum, which makes it the only sector within the Jamaican economy that has grown by as much as two per cent over the period of time, when you find that even the economic growth rate in the United States is less than two per cent.”
