Dr Marshall Hall's practical prescriptions for agriculture appearing in The Sunday Gleaner of August 2 coincided with those of John Maxwell in another newspaper of the same date. Both proposed state involvement - financial and infrastructural support in the proposals of Dr Hall; direct participation in production, processing and marketing in those of Mr Maxwell.

I totally agree that a new approach to agriculture is necessary and that real government commitment is needed rather than the empty talk of the last 40 years.

But government involvement implies political involvement, and this has been the Achilles heel of so many agricultural development programmes in the past, so I agree with Dr Hall's proposals of financial and infrastructural support as the least politically compromising.

There is enough land and manpower here to make Jamaica completely self-sufficient in food (except for grain to make flour) if only farmers could be assured of:

1.Secure ownership of their land, properly documented, which would improve their access to credit.

2.Protection from the bane of praedial larceny, which restricts the farmer to growing only what he can watch and protect. Successful farmers put their extra cash into buying more land, but so often it remains fallow because they cannot plant it for someone else to reap.

3.A source of technical expertise on the crops they grow, or would aspire to grow.

The slow destruction by neglect of the agricultural support centres left from colonial days and the isolation of the University of the West Indies' agriculture faculty in Trinidad have left Jamaican farmers with very little technical support. The situation has improved under RADA but only at a basic level, with no research facility to bring the 21st century to Jamaica's farmers.

4.Development of marketing systems. Government involvement here should include the provision of regular data on prices and availability, and perhaps the encouragement of farmers' marketing cooperatives.

But not - definitely not - direct involvement in buying, selling or processing farm produce. John Maxwell recalls the Agricultural Marketing Corporation of the '70s as successful state involvement to the benefit of both farmer and consumer. I remember it as a haven for political hacks, grossly inefficient, that often dumped truckloads of rotting lettuce, carrots and tomatoes at taxpayers' ultimate expense.

Having spent almost 60 years in the business of converting Jamaican farm produce into marketable products, I have seen many instances of good intentions and hard work undermined by the virus of party politics. Wherever government has the ability to hand out jobs for party faithfulness, the recipients consider them as payment for services rendered and claim ownership of the jobs.

This is quite different to the private sector where a job is earned by effort but never owned, hence the implied balance between performance and reward - no performance/no reward at its extreme.

creating exportable products

Given the four areas of support outlined above, our farmers would soon flood the local market and prices would collapse; so the marketing function would have to include export marketing, and the expansion of processing facilities to absorb the extra production and create exportable products. These structures already exist, but would need to be expanded and updated over time. Mr Maxwell's article illustrated the globalisation of food supply which has put tropical fruits into Scandinavian supermarkets, but which we have generally missed - with a few exceptions such as 'Martha's Best' papayas, developed and marketed by an outstanding farmer with minimal state involvement.

I do not know what new crops can be grown, but large-scale production of staples such as potatoes and yams, a local feedstock for the broiler industry, and new orange groves to replace those lost to tristeza come to mind as crops to replace sugar in some of the soon-to-be-idle estate lands in Trelawny, Clarendon and St Thomas.

I am, etc.,

John Fletcher

johnofletcher@gmail.com