AGRICULTURE MINISTER Roger Clarke is apparently trying to inject some ray of hope into his flagging sector by holding out the possibility of developing a viable cotton production industry. We sincerely hope that his enthusiasm turns out to be justified.
However, judging from this country's track record in developing new agricultural enterprises, the picture becomes much more doubtful. The history of local agriculture is studded with periodic forays into crops that look promising at the outset but soon fade into obscurity.
The quest to widen the agricultural base has included crops such as tea, indigo, rice, Soya bean, tomato, winter vegetables, miracle fruit, macadamia nut, tropical apple and ramie, to name but a few. Jamaican tea at one time won a prestigious prize at an English exposition, but that was not enough to establish it as a regular crop. Indigo did not make it, nor did all the rest on the list.
This periodical foray into diversification has become a constant in Jamaica's agriculture. Indeed, in the case of ramie, a fibre plant which was last mooted in the 1950s, it had been tried so often and for so long that on March 21, 1901 this newspaper ran an editorial which exclaimed: "Ramie Again!"
We get the impression that it is not so much that these crops cannot succeed here, but that our attention span is severely limited. Little effort, it seems, is exerted towards their development on a sustained basis and the process seems to have been: enthusiasm, difficulty, abandonment. Then somebody gets a brain wave years later and repeats the cycle without even knowledge or appreciation of what went before.
Neither agriculture nor any other endeavour has much chance to succeed unless we change this cavalier approach!
The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner.
