If the administration survives and he has a reasonable stint in the job, we won't be surprised if Christopher Tufton is confirmed as Prime Minister Golding's best minister.

And it won't be only because farm output has grown by over 10 per cent - as is currently the case - for which Mr Golding heaped encomiums on his agriculture minister in his closing address on Sunday at the annual conference of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). For current performance remains small beer, given Jamaica's historic low agricultural output, exacerbated in recent years by a spate of storms.

The significant difference between Dr Tufton and his more recent predecessors in the portfolio is the transformational thinking he is bringing to agriculture. He appreciates that agriculture, as currently practised in Jamaica, largely stuck in the 19th century, is incapable of adding substantial wealth to the national economy and lifting the tens of thousands of people it employs out of poverty.

Yet neither does he subscribe to the zero-sum gospel of unrestrained globalisation that Jamaica's agriculture has reached an evolutionary and economic cul de sac, with nothing to offer to national development. The sector, that argument seems to go, should be abandoned to make way for new industries, perhaps agro-processing built on imported raw material.

Such an argument, of course, usually ignores or skims over three primary points, of which the first two are related: agriculture's role in rural employment at a time of economic crisis, and the matter of food security. But more critically, the doctrinal fundamentalism of the "Forget-agriculture!" advocates serves to dismiss the possibility for linkages between agriculture and other sectors of the national economy.

So, they see the sector that employs 220,000 people and its contribution of a mere five per cent of GDP only at current face value, missing its extended contribution to national output of nearly twice that much. And we ignore, too, the potential economic impact, if it were possible, of substituting a portion of Jamaica's food imports with domestic primary production and agro-processing.

Value chain

Last year, for instance, Jamaica's food-import bill was US$900 million, or more than J$80 billion. If only 10 per cent of that could be transferred to local output, the potential savings/domestic business would be J$8 billion. And the estimate of the level of imports that could be replaced is likely to be grossly underestimated.

The larger point is not whether it should be agriculture or something else, but rather that it should be both. The important thing is to find ways to wring value out of domestic farm output by creating an extended value chain, inclusive of efficient growing, value-added processing and brand-based marketing.

That Dr Tufton grasps this is obvious, underlined by his policies and strategic directions. He should be given a fair shot.

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