Local coffee farmers are among the groups who are counting their losses as a result of the heavy rains and earthquake experienced late last year.

Chairman of the Jamaica Coffee Exporters Association (JCEA) Norman Grant told Our Today that natural disasters have significantly affected the production of the 2023/2024 coffee crop.

“Unfortunately the two months of disasters, earthquake, and rain have affected the production of the 2023/2024 crop, whereas the projection was about 300,000 boxes, we lost about 50,000 boxes of coffee from the trees because the rain and the hurricane during the peak period and we are estimating that loss to be about 50,000 boxes, that’s close to J$480million, which is a huge loss sustained by our 500 farmers,” Grant stressed.

Grant added that the woes impacting coffee production have worsened with the poor farm road conditions that local farmers have to contend with.

“It is compounded by the fact that the rural road conditions in the Blue Mountain region are also very poor and against that background, the JCEA is calling on the Government to implement within the Blue Mountain network a road development and maintenance programme that would improve the road conditions so that it can reduce the cost of production, the cost of operation within the Blue Mountain region,”

NORMAN GRANT

“We are also calling on the Ministry of Agriculture to see if they can roll out this J$1 billion of CREP programme [Crop Restoration and Establishment Programme], which is an injection of $200,000 million per year in the form of seeds, seedlings, fertilisers, chemical inputs to assist and cushion some of that blow that has been sustained by coffee farmers,” Grant said.

He believes this fund can assist in boosting production from 30 boxes per acre to between 70 and 80 boxes per acre over five years.

“This can move our production from the 240,000 boxes that we had a year ago to 450,000 boxes. If that happens, you could increase the foreign exchange from coffee alone to US $100,000 million per annum after years,” he said.

Coffee is one of Jamaica’s top-10 export products and is a contributor to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).