( L - R ) Kerr, Amiel

WESTERN BUREAU:

Stakeholders in the agricultural sector on Tuesday lamented the state of the industry, blaming successive political administrations for a lacklustre performance in boosting growth and development.

Chairman of the Jamaica 4-H Clubs, Vindel Kerr, and president of the Jamaican chapter of the Caribbean Agri-Business Association, Dr Keith Amiel, were speaking at the launch of the eighth staging of the Nyammins and Jammins food festival at the Gloustershire Hotel in Montego Bay.

"In the last three decades, the policymakers were more concerned with 'short termism' and doing things to satisfy the immediacy that is the political imperative, which is always to get back in power," Kerr commented.

Making sacrifices

He said that successful econo-mies are those that are willing to make sacrifices, citing, as an example, Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford of Barbados, who froze wages for up to four years to give its government legroom to save and finance other programmes.

"We have the contrast here. We have the largest public-sector budget in the last 10 years and every year they get an increase of 12 per cent," he explained.

Kerr said that Jamaica was at a critical crossroads on the matter of food security, adding that in the 1960s the island was producing six times its present capacity in most of its domestic crops.

Amiel, too, expressed disap-pointment about Jamaica's production plunge.

"When I was a boy at school, my geography books said Jamaica is a tropical country that produces 85 per cent of all the pimento in the world. Now, I would bet anybody that we're down to less than five per cent," said Amiel.

"They came here, they got our plants, they got our ortanique strips, and now if you want ortanique, you have to go to Cuba and Mexico and buy it back," the businessman said.

Revival of sector

He explained that countries unsuccessfully tried to do the same with the Jamaica Hope cattle, which would today offer an opportunity to buy it back and repopulate the country with cattle.

"When I was a boy, there were 35,000 dairy cattle. Now, I think there are about 4,000 or 5,000. The rest of CARICOM (the Caribbean Community) has no cattle, so all Dr (T.P.) Lecky's work has gone in vain."

Amiel called for a revival of the agricultural sector and stressed that students must be made to understand that industry jobs were not wholly focused on tilling the soil.

"We will need horticulturists, agronomists and soil chemists," he added.

Land reform

Amiel said that while the viability of the farm sector depended on training, education, research and development, land reform was a crucial platform of the revitalisation strategy.

"Institutionalised poverty and backwardness is all that subsistence farming can sustain," Amiel said.