Denbigh Agricultural, Industrial, and Food Show 2024
Main Address
By
The Most Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP
Prime Minister of Jamaica
At
Denbigh Agricultural, Industrial, and Food Show
On
August 6, 2024
_______________________________________
It is always a pleasure to address our farmers at Denbigh. It is our Independence Day, it’s a special day for Jamaica. We are now 62 years old. Denbigh is a little bit older at 70. The two things are connected because you can’t really say that you’re independent if you can’t feed yourself so our farmers are critical to our independence.
In the 70s we used to use a term called self-reliance. How many of you remember that? Self-reliance, we must rely on our own resources to satisfy our needs. Indeed, self-reliance was a buzzword at that time. Mark Golding would not know that. I’m just teasing the leader of the opposition. Indeed, it was a term championed by Michael Manley. Yes, sir, I was in short pants then but my father who is still a farmer, would always talk about this self-reliance so from very early in my life I realized the connection between our independence as a people, our pride, our ability to stand on our own, that it is connected and rest upon our ability to feed ourselves. If the ship stopped coming and the aircraft stopped flying, we’re not going to starve and die. So, it is not by coincidence that we are always celebrating our agricultural independence with our national independence. The two things are inextricably tied together but I want to update this term of self-reliance.
I want to introduce another term to our vocabulary that I want our farmers to adopt and to use. It’s a term that is already there in some sense. We say we’re little, but we Tallawa. Yes, we are small, but we are brave in facing challenges and overcoming them. I want you to upgrade that a little bit now by adopting the term resilience. I want you to say that word, resilience. We are a resilient people. Now what does it mean? It sounds like a big word, but it is not really. Resilience is the characteristic, the nature of an entity to be able to quickly recover from a shock adversity, a disaster, a crisis, but not just to recover from it, but to recover stronger.
There is a sense, particularly in our younger generations, that there mustn’t be any trouble in the world, that everything must be smooth sailing, everything must be curated, and everything must be can be easily customized; there is no challenge, but we know that life is not like that, that they are going to be things that happened to us that we didn’t plan for. Things are going to happen that we didn’t know it would happen. Life is filled with unknown quantities and they are going to happen and they are going to create problems for us but those crises that are created also bring opportunities to change the way how we were doing things before, to bring in new ways of doing things that were better than the old ways so we must not look upon challenges and adversity with a fear. What we must do as a resilient people, a people who we naturally believe in our ‘tallawaness’ is that we must prepare for challenges, prepare for crises, prepare for adversity.
And if you are a farmer, you know that one day the storm is going to come. You know that a drought is going to come. You know that some pestilence is going to come and attack your crop or some disease is going to affect your livestock and with this knowledge, what you must do is prepare. And how do we prepare? We must always gather information and the government is going to help you to be prepared through RADA and its extension services. That is what they’re doing when they come and they show you the next new technology, the next new practice. It’s about sharing that information with you to get you prepared.
Another way in which we prepare is that we store and save and that is an area in Jamaican agriculture that we don’t do too well in. One year we have a boom crop and we don’t store the surplus. As they say, we don’t can it. Next year, nothing. We have to import, price gone up. So, in our preparations to be resilient, we have to store and save for a period of time when we don’t have a lot.
The other way that we prepare to be resilient as a people is that we must build infrastructure and I want my farmers now to listen to this carefully because whenever you hear the word infrastructure, you think is something that government must do. It’s so big that I don’t have not to do with infrastructure. Infrastructure represents those kinds of permanent investments that allow you to plant and reap in an efficient way. For example, we see a lot of infrastructure now being developed in greenhouses, a lot of infrastructure being developed in poultry whether it’s a little backyard coop that can take 200, 300 chickens or the big chicken houses, tunnel houses, they call them; infrastructure.
When we are building the infrastructure including the farm roads, including the irrigation, that’s what you call infrastructure. That’s the permanent investment that you lay that gives you several cycles of reaping and planting. When we are building those infrastructures, we must build them knowing that a storm is going to come that will tear up the shade cloth, that will blow off the sheet of zinc on the coop, that will flood your fields, that will wash off the marl on the farm road and therefore it means that we can’t just build infrastructure that won’t withstand disaster. So those are three areas of preparedness for a crisis but the government itself, my dear farmers, must build resilience because some crisis going to happen in government.
Now, let me tell you, not every government can deal with crisis. Some government are just dry-weather government. They only can operate crisis when there is no crisis and Jamaica has had its fair share of governments that were not prepared to deal with challenges and crisis. Why? Well, a part of it is that we never dealt with our finances in such a way that when crises strike you are able to address them. This administration has rearranged its fiscal affairs in order to be able to deal with crises and shocks. I want to make a point to my farmers.
Many of you have what they call the almanac and you swear by it according to the weather. You look at the full moon and the this and the that. Well, let me share a little knowledge with you, time change. The weather now is quite different from the weather 10 years ago, from the weather 20 years ago, from the weather 30 years ago. The hottest day ever recorded on earth was on the 22nd of July 2024, my birthday. The hottest day ever recorded on Earth. The hottest day ever recorded in Jamaica was in, I believe, June 2019. The temperature is changing and it is not just random variability, it is a trend which is leading to a long-term change in the climate. So things that you thought would happen 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you can’t use that knowledge to predict what is going to happen in the future because our climate has changed. It’s something that all farmers need to pay attention to.
When we used to get weather events that you could consider them once in 50 years, you now get these weather events once every 10 years. I want you for 2 minutes, no more than that, to think back in the last 8 years on the number of weather crises that we have faced. Just think back on it, 8 years. Almost every year we have had a drought that is of significance that it has affected your agriculture, particularly if you live in St Elizabeth and Clarendon. Almost every year there is a drought, that wasn’t the case before. Almost every year we have had a rain incident that has led to flooding, which has delivered more rain than the average rainfall for the year.
For the last eight years almost every two years, we have had a tropical depression in Jamaica, which has had a budgetary impact whether it’s Hurricane Zeta, Eta, whether it is the outer bands of Matthew and Irma and all of those. We are living in a period of time where you can expect to have frequent multiple and overlapping crises whether it is from the weather or a pandemic.
Let’s look at the pandemic quickly, my farmers. We had a pandemic and then what happened immediately after the pandemic? We had a disruption in supply chains which led to inflation. And then immediately after that, we had a war in the Ukraine which further led to energy price shocks and all of that is happening with weather events and all of those things are impacting on the government budget. When the government go to parliament and read the budget and then some weather event happen the government has to divert the resources.
So in the past when we’ve said the budget is X and something happened, we have to take out some of that budget and spend on the disaster so that means that things that we planned to do were disrupted by things that we did not plan for. So the irrigation that you wanted, the farm road that you wanted, the bridge that you wanted couldn’t get done because whether it is an economic shock, because of our depression, a weather shock because of hurricane, heavy rain, drought or some global pandemic, we have had to be diverting and that has been Jamaica’s experience. And that’s why Jamaica hasn’t grown and that is why our infrastructure has not improved because the revenues that we generate are constantly being diverted into treating with unplanned eventualities.
We decided as an administration to change this and to introduce resiliency into our financial management and what we did, we have a couple years where we generated some small surpluses, we put that into our disaster fund. We invested in insurance and we created surpluses so when a disaster happens as Beryl, we don’t have to wait on anybody. We don’t have to beg anybody. We don’t have to scrounge around looking, but most importantly, we do not have to divert resources from our capital budget to deal with recovery.
I’m going to concretize that point in the minds of the farmers. Right now, Hurricane Beryl has struck but we are not stopping the capital budget for the Essex Valley Irrigation Project. No, we’re not stopping that. That’s a massive project. We’re not stopping the capital budget for the Southern Plains Irrigation Project. No, we’re not stopping that, that is going on. Right now Jamaica has about 12-13% of its arable land irrigated. If you want to get serious about agriculture, you need to have about 50% of your arable lands with irrigation capital investment. Now, with the Southern Plains Irrigation and with the Essex Valley and with some other things we’re doing with Pedro Plains, we will probably add another 5-7% of irrigation to our arable land.
Now, that is what you call a massive infrastructure investment that is going to make more farmers be able to produce more. That is the essence of being resilient and independent. It is a substantial difference from what happened in the past and what is happening now. A lot of people won’t see it. They won’t understand it. It’s not tangible in front of them but that is how countries develop. Countries develop when they are faced with challenges and crises but it does not derail their long-term development plan. Jamaica is now on that pathway that if we are faced with challenges and crisis, we can still maintain our long-term development plan. That is a fundamental difference in Jamaica. Jamaica is not the same as it was 10 years ago. Jamaica is in a better place.
So the 800 million dollars that Minister Green is planning to spend on improving agricultural roads, particularly in the Blue Mountains to support coffee, that money is not going to be diverted to give fertilizers to farmers which is what would have happened if we did not have this reserve. We would have had to go recast the capital budget to support these kinds of recovery efforts, that doesn’t happen today. And I want every single farmer to appreciate this. This is a fundamental and important difference, which is going to improve your quality of life.
As I close my presentation to you, I want to thank our partners and friends and neighbours in Cayman, Premier O’Connor Connolly and her team and as he has been described as the unofficial ambassador to official Dr The Honourable McKeever Bush, and the Minister of Agriculture from Cayman. I want to thank you for attending this event. You are regular attendees and I must say that Jamaica received significant support from the international community. Cayman supported the government with relief supplies and some computers and I tell you it is very much well received and appreciated and we want to say thank you.
Several countries have supported us including the United Nations have supported us and other multilateral entities and again we want to say thanks. I particularly want to acknowledge the corporate entities that have supported us. I see High Pro is here. You know what, I don’t want to get into calling names but look, if I didn’t call your name, see me afterwards and the next place I’ll call your name but I have to say Rainforest Seafood and the NCB Foundation. Well, they’re all here. I’m not going to call it TEF, I’m not going to call HEART, but I will call St Jago Farm Store; they have been giving as well and the local philanthropy, Mark. If there’s one thing you can say about us as Jamaicans, our corporate philanthropy is significant. Our private sector, thankfully, doesn’t sit by and say, let the government deal with it. They have come on board in a significant way, and I want to commend them for that. That is significant, including our churches and members of the diaspora who have come on board and assisted. It is all good.
So as I close, I wanted to point out again to my farmers that you are an important part of the structure of the economy. After the pandemic, the global economic structure changed in fundamental ways. People decided to work from home, that changed electricity consumption patterns. People decided, you know what, I’m going to work for myself, that changed employment patterns. People change the way in which they consume. People became more health conscious and that changed market and production patterns but it also affected, in a significant way, the cost of living. Food, in particular, became more expensive and in Jamaica, that was the case. Immediately after the pandemic, we saw a steep rise in inflation and that has impacted how particularly poor households are able to survive. If one day you went to the supermarket and your basket of good was $10,000 and the next week that you go, it’s $12,000 and the next week that you go is $14,000 and the next week that you go is $15,000. You’re paying more money and probably getting less food. When you go home, you’re vexed. And who are you going to be vexed with? Who do you curse? Whose fault? Poor government have nothing to do with it but obviously, we are the ones you elect to treat with this situation. An external shock, we didn’t have anything to do with it but an external global event occurred, which changed the structure of the economy, which caused prices to rise. It’s not just here in Jamaica, everywhere in the world.
For those of you who travel, you will see it and it has made consumers miserable, as they say, upset, angry but government has a role to play in this, even though government didn’t cause it but government has a role to play in it, and it is a part of the resiliency agenda. Because the truth is, if we were producing more of our food locally, and producing more of it, the prices would not be so susceptible to global price movements; that is the reality. So you know what we need to do to build resilience? We need to start producing more of the foods that we consume locally and produce more of it.
I have given an instruction to the Minister of Agriculture as part of our food security and resilience to come up by April 2025 with a national plan to build resiliency in agriculture, which would include increasing the local production of goods here in Jamaica, using Jamaican input and Jamaican resources to increase our processing capabilities for food, to increase our storage capabilities for food, to increase the financing available to small and medium size and large farmers because we must start to treat agriculture as a business and not only as a passion.
The minister has already started. He has secured funding to bring in the consultant and I don’t want another study that is going to be put on file 13. As we work out the pathways to resiliency, we are going to start implementing and that means that whatever we agree to do, we are going to put it in the budget so it goes through the public investment process so it gets on the train line of projects that will not disturbed because as I have said to you today, on our Independence Day, agriculture is about our independence. When our athletes do well, and we smile and we laugh and we say good, it’s the same way you’re going to feel when you go in the supermarket and the price keep going down and down and down and the quality goes up and up and it’s not just starch and sugar, but quality nutrition that you’re getting, it’s the same way you’re going to feel proud of your country and proud of yourself because you realize, Lawd, Jamaica can feed itself.
So my farmers, my Jamaicans, on our Independence Day, God bless you and God bless Jamaica land we love.