Hard decision needed for survival of cofee, sugar, dairy

AGRICULTURE MINISTER, Roger Clarke, has said that "hard decisions" will have to be made in order to ensure viability of the sugar, coffee and dairy industries.

"It cannot be business as usual, we have to take some very painful decisions..... If we are going to be competing on the international scene, we have to do what some of those people are doing. I am not here advocating whole-scale redundancy, but let us understand that it will have to come," Mr. Clarke explained.

He was speaking at a planning workshop at the Hilton Kingston Hotel, aimed at the creation of a Caribbean Centre for Applied Biosystems, which is to start in Jamaica and then extend to the rest of the region.

Commenting on coffee, he noted that Jamaica got three and four times what other producers got for their coffee, but the sector was still not viable and something had to be done to address this matter.

"We have to make painful decisions. We looked at a situation recently in Costa Rica, a plant processing twice as much as our plant is using 25 people at peak period and about 12 or 15 in off-periods. One area alone in our processing facility uses 300 people," the Minister said.

"It's going to be about management and about making hard decisions, because that is the only way we are going to survive. If we don't, everybody is going to be out," he added.

Presenting a historical background on the sector, Mr. Clarke said agriculture had been affected negatively by problems with marketing, high input costs, low productivity, pests and diseases, inadequate research and praedial larceny.

He said farmers had started to diversify their operations, moving from traditional crops into non-traditional areas, which resulted in a situation where 70 different crops were produced locally. The Minister said the Government had tried to reorganise the system over time and had encouraged farmers to diversify in many areas.

"The world is not going to wait on us, we will have to be flexible and we have to find a way to survive. It is obvious that new approaches and strategies have to be put in place to revitalise the sector and to form the changes necessary to make the sector globally competitive," he said, noting that agriculture was one of the main productive sectors targeted in the National Industrial Policy (NIP).

Pointing out that the majority of farmers were people who farmed small plots, the Minister said it was difficult to get them to accept new technologies as well as the changes in the marketplace as they related to protection and guaranteed markets and government control.

"It is hard to get them to understand that this is 'a new world' and we have to find ways and means to adapt to the changing world," Mr. Clarke stressed..

He said the Government has decided to put in place a programme to modernise the sector in a way that was compatible with World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreements.

Mr. Clarke said the Government felt research and development was of paramount importance to the process, as was the need to improve the quality of the extension services offered, as well as irrigation.

In his remarks, Miley Gonzales, Under Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture, said it was important that farmers accept the appropriate science and technology applications used to enhance agriculture.

He noted also that if the problems included the education levels of farmers, then systems had to be developed to address that matter.

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