Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining Minister Floyd Green has revised the estimated damage to the agricultural sector from Hurricane Beryl to $6.5 billion.
This is up from the $5.7 billion estimate which the minister had provided to Parliament recently.
Additionally, the cost to get the sector to return to its pre-Beryl state has increased by an additional $2 billion, up from the more than $8 billion estimate provided by Green recently.
In addressing a Hurricane Beryl relief handover ceremony at Hi-Pro’s head office in White Marl, St Catherine on Thursday, Green was quick to point out that further losses from the fisheries sector could increase the estimated damages.
“We’re now at about $6.5 billion in damage,” Green informed, adding that the figure ballooned due to farmers still calculating their damages.
“… As you know in agriculture, the first thing our farmers do is look to see what they can salvage before determining their full loss,” Green explained.
He said additional figures from some of the island’s fisher folks are also being tallied.
“That (estimate) is the loss to the sector, but rebuilding the sector would normally take about one-and-a-half times the costs of the loss,” Green indicated.
“So, we’re looking at close to $10 billion that it will take to get us back to where we were before Hurricane Beryl,” he added.
To support recovery efforts, especially relative to poultry farmers who were the hardest hit following the passage of Beryl, Hi-Pro has distributed 140,000 baby chicks to assist small-scale poultry farmers, and committed to a $5 million contribution in additional input materials to the overall agricultural sector.
At the presentation ceremony, it was noted that the company has been engage in a much larger ongoing support programme for the agricultural sector.
Further, Green said the ministry has allocated $60 million for the procurement of layer and broiler chicks, with $26 million being also set aside to repair damaged chicken houses.
Green said within a two-week period, farmers have been given seeds to replant, while the ministry plans to ramp up its poultry programme next week.
This, said the minister, is critical, as approximately 300,000 animals were lost during the hurricane, mostly chickens.
In fact, he said among the layer and broiler farmers are women who head “single female-run households”, and that form of livestock farming is their “source of income, especially in generating funds for back-to-school (expenses).”
Green gave the ministry’s commitment to “working with our small chicken farmers to get them back into production as quickly as possible.”