KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC—Prime Minister Andrew Holness has instructed creating a nationwide plan by April 2025 to construct resilience inside the agriculture sector.
The directive relayed to Floyd Inexperienced, Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining, was issued because the Prime Minister challenges the sector’s stakeholders to undertake a tradition of resilience.
That is towards the backdrop of Hurricane Beryl’s latest onslaught and the nuisances of local weather change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and different adversities which were plaguing the business.
Talking throughout the Denbigh Agricultural, Industrial, and Meals Present within the southern parish of Clarendon earlier this week, Holness stated the instruction to Inexperienced varieties a part of Jamaica’s meals safety and resilience.
Consequently, the Prime Minister stated the nationwide plan would come with “rising the native manufacturing of products, right here in Jamaica, utilizing Jamaican enter and sources.”
Moreover, he knowledgeable that the plan is meant “to extend our processing capabilities for meals, to extend our storage capabilities for meals [and] to extend the financing out there to small, medium-sized, and huge farmers, as a result of we should begin to deal with agriculture as a enterprise and never solely as a ardour.”
The Prime Minister suggested that Inexperienced has commenced work on the plan and has secured funding to recruit a advisor.
In the meantime, the Prime Minister maintains that, although small, Jamaica is courageous in dealing with challenges and overcoming them.
“We’re a resilient folks. Resilience is the character of an entity to rapidly get better from a shock, adversity, a catastrophe, [or] a disaster, not simply to get better from it however to get better stronger,” he defined.
Consequently, Holness urged farmers to make the most of crises and “change the best way we had been doing issues earlier than, to introduce new methods of doing issues that [are] higher than the outdated methods.”
“So, we should not look upon challenges and adversity with concern. What we should do, as resilient individuals who naturally imagine in our ‘tallawahness,’ is that we should put together for adversity,” he added.
The Prime Minister stated that farmers ought to retailer and save meals for durations when meals provides might lower and construct sound infrastructure to safeguard towards disasters of their preparations to be resilient.
The Denbigh present marked the seventieth anniversary of the historic occasion, which is the most important of its sort within the English-speaking Caribbean.
It coincided with the 62nd Anniversary of Jamaica’s attaining political independence from Nice Britain on August 6, 1962.
A number of dignitaries and officers, domestically and regionally, had been in attendance, together with the Premier of the Cayman Islands, Juliana O’Connor Connolly.
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