Widespread devastation for agri-sector

Egg farmers may have sustained greater losses during Hurricane Melissa than during Hurricane Beryl in July last year, according to anecdotal reports reaching the Financial Gleaner.

However, the status of the wider poultry sector was immediately clear, but the agricultural sector overall has suffered a devastating blow, the extent to which will begin to emerge this week.

Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Floyd Green indicated that more layer birds were lost during Melissa’s rampage, even as the authorities continue calculating the impact of the catastrophic hurricane that flattened parts of Jamaica on Tuesday.

“So far we have had reports of significant damage to the layer houses in production. So it will impact our egg production,” said Green in an interview.

“During Hurricane Beryl, we lost about 40,000 layer birds. We already have one farmer who has lost about 45,000 layer birds (during Melissa),” he said on Friday.

Efforts to contact the Jamaica Egg Farmers Association for a comment have been unsuccessful.

Earlier this month president Mark Campbell said weather permitting there would be adequate supplies of eggs for Christmas. But the advent of Melissa means that’s now unlikely.

That was the case last December when there was a shortage of eggs as the sector did not recover sufficiently following the passage of Beryl.

Asked about the impact of Melissa on the chicken meat sector, Green said he had not heard many reports from the large commercial chicken producers. He noted however that the broiler houses had stood up well during Beryl.

The large broiler chicken houses are located in the parishes of St Catherine and Clarendon which were not as badly hit by Melissa as the western part of the island.

The two largest chicken producers – Jamaica Broilers Group and Caribbean Broilers, which trades as CB Group – did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday on how they fared during Melissa.

Regarding the impact on the wider agriculture sector, Minister Green said the ministry’s extension officers were experiencing challenges travelling around Jamaica to assess the damage. He said an estimate of the cost of the damage would likely be provided on Tuesday.

“What I can say is that there has been widespread devastation to the agriculture sector, especially across the western parishes. Some of our most prolific agricultural production zones, including some of our vegetable lines, yams, bananas, plantains have been impacted,” said Green.

“We have tried to cover all the parishes, but we will have separate teams that will go across St Elizabeth, Manchester, Westmoreland, St James, Hanover, and Trelawny. We have been collecting information from those parishes that were more accessible and we’re also seeing significant damage to livestock, small poultry farmers and small ruminant farmers,” he said.

luke.douglas@gleanerjm.com