Let’s go nuts over coconuts
THE BEST news last week was the decision announced by incoming Minister of Agriculture Audley Shaw to take Government’s sticky hands off the big money attributable to the Coconut Industry Board from its part-ownership of the Seprod Group.
Twinned with this was his announcement of a longpostponed inventory of government lands with a view to increasing agricultural output. Then, (did I hear right?) he seemed to recognise the simple, radical and long-denied proposition that the nation cannot progress if private owners leave their productive lands fallow for long periods.
Finally, someone seems to be remembering that we have landutilisation legislation dormant on the books and that unless we have a viable combination of land and labour, there will be little inclusive development.
The liberation of the money to really expand the coconut industry is immediately significant. For two generations, we have been persuaded by pseudo-science that coconut oil was bad for our health and that there was nothing special about coconut water. For years, we coconut growers were told not to sell our nuts to the ‘jelly man’ but to reserve them for the copra factory, which paid you pity-melittle and was a dying industry.
Now, we know that there is a coconut and by-product industry in North America worth almost US$1.5 billion and growing at 25 per cent each year. Coconut water is now rated as a better hydrate than some worldfamed brand names, and the oil is considered an effective inhibitor of dementia.
This demand is now served by Asian groves where millions of trees are destined to go out of production in about the same 10 years it would take us to bring our expanded cultivations into production.
Here then is a tremendous foreign exchange-earning opportunity for Jamaica that will require immediate allocation of more than 1,000 hectares of land and a significant build-out of seedling production capacity to yield a million plants each year. Healthy, disease-resistant coconut seedlings can fetch up to US$10 each on an underserved export market.
Over the years, the Coconut Industry Board has led all our traditional commodity boards in research to do with plant pathology, the development of varietals, and good extension services. So there is a solid base to build upon. And now there is the capital to do so. The board should be tasked to present the nation with a comprehensive plan for massive expansion within six months, which, thereafter, should be executed under the supervision, but not the control, of the Ministry of Agriculture.
Locate these prospects in the context of our other traditional agricultural exports, all in neglectful decline; all bereft of long-term planning and ready cash. When last have you heard a national discussion, let alone even a sketch of a long-term, funded plan for cane and sugar, bananas, coffee, cocoa or pimento? Why? Have we given up on these sources of foreign exchange earning? And if so, replaced them with what?
All of us, in successive governments, are at fault for not sufficiently apprising the population of the chronic crisis of production and productivity in the agricultural arena. With at least half of all constituencies depending on some type of agriculture, I wonder how we can be so silent about declining output even as we splurge the unearned foreign dollars to buy the ‘criss’ cars and keep them running while we squabble in Gordon House.
So this is to commend the coconut growers, large and small, for mounting a successful defence of their resources; to remember someone like the late Dr Richard Jones, who led the industry well, and to encourage other farmers groups to stand up for themselves with renewed vigour.
I wonder how we can be so silent about declining output even as we splurge the unearned foreign dollars to buy the ‘criss’ cars and keep them running while we squabble in Gordon House.