Opposition spokesman on agriculture, Senator Anthony Johnson has expressed dissatisfaction with the level of assistance given to the island's farmers whose crops were devastated by Hurricane Ivan two years ago.
Senator Johnson charged that many farmers still have not received any assistance in resuscitating their farms although the Government claimed it had allocated $300,000 million for this cause. "I don't know how much was disbursed, but I know that there are tens of thousands of farmers in St. Thomas, Portland, St. Catherine, Clarendon, Manchester and St. Elizabeth who have received absolutely nothing," he said in his contribution to the State of the Nation Debate in Parliament on July 7.
Assistance programme
Under the programme of assistance designed for farmers whose properties were devastated by the hurricane, former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson said at the time that some 75,000 farmers were affected and would each receive $4,000. There are an estimated 150,000 farmers in Jamaica.
But the Opposition agriculture spokesman stressed that the sum was inadequate to provide any meaningful assistance to the farmers. "The promise of even $5,000 per farmer could not restart an operation that lost two acres of citrus or 2,000 chickens or an acre of coffee ...," Senator Johnson argued.
Furthermore, he criticised the method used to give assistance to farmers as ineffective, proposing instead that the Government should have allocated the money to provide affected farmers with an acre of cash crops like pumpkin, hot pepper, tomato, red peas or scallion. "If 40,000 farmers were helped (in this way) it would cost Jamaica $2 billion and earn $4 billion," Senator Johnson pointed out.
He suggested further that the Government could have implemented an emergency tariff on certain imported agricultural produce to guarantee a market for the increased production of food from our farmers.
Senator Johnson urged the Government to revise the assistance programme as "We need a plan for the re-development, re-engineering and rebuilding of their (the farmers') operations so that they end up better off than they were before."
