Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining, Hon. Floyd Green emphasizing a point while making his contribution to the 2024/25 Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives, recently.
June 5, 2024 (JIS):
The Government has allocated $60 million to continue supporting onion farmers and boost local production of the crop.
Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining, Hon. Floyd Green, said the allocation will be used to increase the use of technology by installing driers to sustain and enhance onion production.
He was making his contribution to the 2024/25 Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives, recently.
“We are going to support our local farming groups some more. We’ve earmarked $60 million to help local onion farmers to put in the technology for drying houses, so that they can extend the shelf life of their crops,” he said.
Mr. Green informed that between 2017 and 2023, the country’s local onion production grew by 644 per cent.
“We moved from producing 800 metric tonnes to now producing 6,000 metric tonnes locally. Onion imports for this year are down 11.9 per cent,” Mr. Green noted.
The Minister said the initiatives introduced under the Production and Productivity Programme have significantly increased local onion production.
“The demand for onions has moved from 8,000 metric tonnes in 2017 to 13,000 metric tonnes in 2023, so the demand has increased. In 2017, we produced about eight per cent of our consumption needs and we had earmarked that we would reach 40 per cent by 2023,” Mr. Green said.
“We have surpassed our goal of 40 per cent and we are now at 44 per cent of our consumptive needs. If the consumption was the same as it was in 2017, we would have been at 71 per cent of our consumptive needs,” the Minister said.
Meanwhile, he pointed out that a $5-million water-catchment system has been built to support Irish potato farmers.
“We could also speak about Irish potato as one of our priority crops that has had tremendous difficulty over the last two years, because they do not farm in areas where they have access to water. But we’re fixing that…; in fact, this year we’ve constructed a $5,000,000 water-catchment system in Hinds Town (St. Ann), to ensure that the farmers in that area are able to do better next year,” he said.
