Mark Brooks is an obviously tenacious and persistent man who holds passionately that Jamaica can do far better at agriculture than current data suggest to be possible.

He believes, though, that performance is actually worse than the official figures say - that is, that actual farm output is below the eight per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

He believes that the situation can be improved and that while Jamaica may not become totally self-sufficient, it can go a far way in improving food security, which is a declared goal of the agriculture minister, Dr Christopher Tufton.

We expect, therefore, that Mr Brooks would have shared Dr Tufton's elation at the $6-billion loan that Jamaica is receiving from the Caribbean Development Bank for on-lending to farmers at, in comparison to the rest of the market, the cheap rate of eight per cent.

"These loan funds are going to be used to encourage the modernisation of the agricultural sector," Dr Tufton told the legislature last week.

Opportunities for employment

We welcome the initiative, recognising that in these stressful times, with other areas of the economy weakened by the global recession, a resuscitated agriculture sector offers opportunities for employment and import substitution. The impact, ultimately, will be on the balance of payments and social stability.

But there is one major area where Mark Brooks and officials in Jamaica disagree in terms of emphasis and urgency, and that is on what is required to rejuvenate the island's farm output.

The conventional wisdom is that Jamaican farms need to mechanise their operations and use more inputs, such as fertilisers, to improve yields. However, the high interest rates make such investments unaffordable, while cheap imports from more agriculturally efficient countries further undermine the capacity of Jamaican farmers to compete.

Mr Brooks believes, too, that a fundamental part of the problem has to do, to put it crudely, with a kind of sick-soil syndrome in Jamaica; in essence, Jamaica has consistently misdiagnosed the problem.

In other words, there is a problem, he argues, of nutrients in Jamaica's soil - too much of the bad stuff, like nematodes, fungi, the overworking of agricultural plots, and so on. In such a situation, the adding of more and more chemical fertiliser has little effect in increasing yields, because the plants are being attacked by all the 'nasties' in the soil.

Not taken seriously

This is a matter to which scientists have increasingly been paying attention, among them Professor Camille Coates-Beckford, a nematologist at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. Unfortunately, for the better part of a decade, Mr Brooks has found it difficult to get officialdom to pay serious attention to his concerns, and when they do, there is a sense that he is being humoured.

Happily, Dr Tufton recently appointed a steering committee to look into the problem, in which his boss, Prime Minister Golding, professes interest. Hopefully, Dr Tufton will lend policy support and rigour to the matter.

Perhaps, too, Dr Tufton won't find it too much of a burden to commit about US$20,000 to equip a lab to do soil testing on specific soil types and to come up with treatment. That can't be asking too much.

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