Commissioning of Parnassus Irrigation System and Launch of Parnassus Agro Park in Clarendon
Keynote Address
By
Dr the Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP
Prime Minister of Jamaica
At the
Commissioning of Parnassus Irrigation System
And
Launch of Parnassus Agro Park, Clarendon
On
April 23, 2025
____________________________________________________________
Permanent secretary, I don’t know why you have felt the need to tell this audience my business. Yes, I do have a passion for agriculture, my father is currently a farmer, a struggling farmer. I spent many summers on his farm and so I have a deep appreciation for the struggles that farmers go through; weather, finance and of course, this very strange thing we call praedial larceny. I have searched for this in other countries, and I can’t seem to find it. It is a Jamaican affliction, two-foot puss.
I was very pleased as I entered the facility when I spoke with the senior superintendent in charge of the parish who told me of the amazing reduction in murders and violent crimes over a 49% reduction since the beginning of the year. I offered my commendations to the police team. They have done an amazing job, but I commend you the citizens of the parish because your own cooperation is also important in the reduction of violence, and I encourage you to continue to cooperate with the strategies and policies of the government and with the tactics of the police in reducing these murders; but your cooperation is going to be needed even more because the police pointed out that they do have a strategy to deal with praedial larceny in the area and that strategy relies heavily on the cooperation of the farmers and the citizens generally, so that we can finally put an end to those two foot puss.
Minister Green, thank you for bigging up everybody, but I must big up our British High Commissioner. When David Cameron was the Prime Minister, he visited Jamaica sometime in 2015 and he launched the Caribbean Investment Fund. Do you see how long ago that was? I was then the leader of the opposition. I had an opportunity to meet him and this was part of the discussion so I’m very happy today in 2025, 10 years after to be able to turn over to the farmers of Clarendon this agro park.
Jamaica has about 40% of its landmass, which could be considered arable, meaning you can farm it. Of that presently, only about 15% would be irrigated. With this and Essex Valley, the Southern Plains Agricultural Development Project, (SPAD), we will probably get close to 20% of our arable lands irrigated. That’s still not enough. I want you to consider what that means. It means that you can only exercise some degree of control over your agriculture in only 15% of your arable land. The rest of your lands would be subject to the vicissitudes, the change in weather, so the output, the productivity that you would like to get would be subject to climate change issues, weather issues, and that’s not good for sustained agriculture.
And so, the strategy of the government, which is why when we were asked, what would you like the support that is coming from the Caribbean Infrastructure Fund to be deployed into, we said, let’s put it into making our agriculture resilient and sustainable. Let’s build infrastructure that mitigates climate, weather, and other factors and so that is what we are doing here today. This is a big thing.
Now, we have another big project that is being worked on. Minister Green pointed out that the last time the Ministry of Agriculture did anything of this magnitude, which would be Spring Plains, he hadn’t been born yet. Well, to give you a sense of the generations I was, but even before I was born the politician after whom I was named, Michael Manley, posited the idea of harnessing the water from the Black River to irrigate the Pedro Plains. That was 50-plus years ago. It wasn’t done. I’m pleased to say that we are well on our way to doing it and when we do Pedro Plains, which is well on its way, we would’ve moved our irrigated lands to being about 50% of our arable lands. Can you imagine the fundamental shift in our agricultural productivity when we are able to mitigate and control weather impacts on our arable land?
That’s fundamental, but this is not the kind of achievement that voters celebrate, unfortunately. A lot of it is voters don’t know this, some don’t understand it, but the farmers who have been practicing mulching for decades in Southern St Elizabeth, because that is how they mitigated the weather effect when they now have reliable water that is coming from pipes and irrigation systems that they can plan in advance, they will see the transformation. And what the average voter will see is far more foodstuff on their supermarket shelves, and in the Coronation Market, and in Linstead Market, and all over, but what they will also see is a stability in price so this will have an impact on the cost of food.
So yes, you, the average voter listening to me who said how does this benefit me, this only benefits the little farmers in Parnassus. No, my friend, it is these kinds of investments that benefit you. The cost-of-living crisis that we face, a part of it is an agriculture crisis. It is precisely because we have low productivity in agriculture why we have a food price crisis and until our voters make that connection to inform how they vote, they will not get good agricultural policies. What they will satisfy with are easy but destructive policies that say we should put a tax on imported goods rather than seeking to address the fundamental issues which are more difficult, which are not going to happen in one election cycle as this did not happen in one election cycle.
This started in 2019. I wonder if you see what I’m saying that the transformation of Jamaica is not going to be stupid promises, even lovely sounding promises and as we are in the promising season when politicians are going to come to tell you that they will give you horses that can fly. The worry is not the politicians who are going to tell you that the horse that they are selling can fly, the worry is the voter who believes. And therefore, as a politician who, yes, I will come with gifts on mules, I have to also be very frank with you and tell you what the realities are, and that has always been me, nobody can question that; I tell you as it is. I have learned a little bit that I have to put a little sugar in it here and there. I have learned, but I’m still telling you as it is.
I can stand here today and tell you, not a promise, I’m delivering on a commitment and I’m telling you what else is coming. We are now at approximately 15% irrigated land. After this project, we will be at approximately 20, and when we complete the Pedro Plains, which, it is going to cross the electoral election cycle, it’s a multi-year project, but when we complete it, we will be at about 50% and that will be a profound shift in Jamaica’s agriculture.
I could very well end my presentation here, but my speech writers would be upset so it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the official opening of the Parnassus Agriculture Agro Park, an important step forward in our ongoing mission to transform agriculture in Jamaica. Today, we not only celebrate the commissioning of critical agricultural infrastructure, but we also recognize its role in my government’s pivot towards inclusive, sustainable, and climate-resilient growth in rural agriculture.
Today, we are planting the seeds of resilience and opportunity. This agro park represents a future where Jamaican farmers are empowered, communities are revitalized, and our country moves closer to a competitive and climate-resilient agriculture sector. Agriculture is not just a pillar of our economy; it is the foundation of our national food security. As global supply chains face increasing pressure and climate change threatens traditional productive systems, it is more important than ever that we as a country can feed ourselves. A strong agricultural sector ensures that our people have access to affordable, nutritious food even in times of crisis. It reduces our dependence on imports, shields us from external shocks and creates the conditions for real independence, economic and social.
In a world marked by geopolitical tensions, rising energy costs, and unpredictable commodity markets, food security is now a matter of national security, but food security is also an important part of our economic policy. Food security is seen as an important part of what they would call the microeconomic policy, agriculture; how do we get farmers onto lands, get the prices stabilized, and put in place the infrastructure to support them but in a sense, it is also a part of what you would describe as the kind of macroeconomic policy as well because having a strong agricultural sector is a buffer to inflation.
And I want to spend just a minute here to drive home that point because when the average Jamaican hears about inflation, the first thing that comes to mind is my purchasing power is going to be eaten out because the prices of goods have increased and therefore our wage negotiations and I’m not dealing with wage negotiations here, but immediately, there would be pressure on wages to be adjusted upwards in order to compensate for the loss of purchasing power due to inflation.
I want you to think back for me, all of you who are here including those of you who were born in the 80s and 90s, that’s the beginning of your world, who may not understand the tragedy that Jamaica went through in the 90s with inflation. And in the early 2000s, the impact of inflation then and the conversation then was about the macroeconomic adjustment so it’s either you’re going to increase your wages or increase your interest rates to keep your currency stable to avoid currency-induced inflation or imported inflation, but we have never had a conversation about the impact of increasing productivity on inflation.
That’s not a consideration in the Jamaican context. In other words, for the last four or five decades, we have not addressed the issue of productivity. The permanent secretary uses the term facade. He says it’s a facade, the strategy of constantly trying to adjust wages to keep up with inflation is a facade. We’re just tricking ourselves, keeping ourselves in a loop where we are constantly losing real value because we’re not increasing our output.
So, what you have to see this as is an attempt to have a genuine real increase in Jamaica’s productivity in Jamaica’s output, and this is what will have a real impact on inflation. Now granted farmers, some of the inflation that happens in Jamaica, particularly in the past, happened because of bad government policy.
Now, we have put bad government policy out of the mix by putting in place strong institutions, independent central bank, strong fiscal structures to control government policy, and now we have inflation targeting. And so, you will see that STATIN released this month’s figures, which were incredible. I think it was something like 0% inflation. In other words, this means that the government’s policy is having very limited impact on inflation so having solved that, then what would be the other drivers that could create inflation. Yes, imported inflation and sometimes inflation induced because of supply issues.
For example, if there is bad weather and because of a drought, the output of farmers fall, what is going to happen to the price of goods in the market? It’s going to go up and it’s going to reflect as inflation but if you make the hard choice that even when you’re going to get cursed for not doing things immediately but you have made that long-term investment in digging the wells, in cutting the roads, in, cutting the land, in getting the titles for the farmers in building the reservoir to store the water, in buying those pumps, which take a long time to make sure that when this comes into full operation rain or shine, you will have a level of output that will keep prices stable. That is how you impact inflation and the cost of living.
This administration has changed the way in which government operates. We now need to change the way in which our electorate thinks because the old way of thinking is not going to solve the challenges of today and the challenges you face. So, everybody says, yes, increase the minimum wage, which we have been doing gradually because we don’t want any economic fallout. Everybody’s quarrelling about their wages and it’s unfair, and I understand the issues, and we are trying our best to slowly make the adjustments so that we don’t have an economic fallout but beyond that, that is not going to be the solution for Jamaica. Beyond that, the solution has to be that each and every one of us must increase our productivity. It is in the increase in our output that the unit cost goes down and therefore the prices remain stable. How do I get the average Jamaican to appreciate that and shift the mentality to look at how we become more productive?
What this is, is an investment in our productivity. Every farmer who comes onto this land is immediately more productive than farmers struggling out there without water, without storage, without proper roads and so the objective of the Government- Minister Green, if he were released to tell you the discussions that we have in Cabinet, he would know how much beating he got to get these projects going, to get them out of the ground. Now, I’m not saying here that I’m 100% pleased because I do recall several conversations even with former ministers about why this project is taking so long.
It shouldn’t have taken this long. And as I look at it on reflection, this project is two years late. Why? For another reason, that I have said, Jamaica must address its public bureaucracy. We have gotten caught in this culture of analysis paralysis. Yes, and there are those who will seek to say that you are corrupt, that you are trying to circumvent procedures but what they’re really wanting to do is to hide behind a wall of circuitous regulation that leads to nowhere, and in my mind, that is the corruption.
It has no bearing on whether or not things are delivered quickly, whether or not the farmers benefit, or whether or not the customer is served. It’s no benefit to them, and we are going to destroy that. We’re going to break down that wall of unnecessary bureaucracy, things that don’t make sense. Entities that have been formed and are on the public’s budget year after year and can’t show what they give to the public, those allocations must be questioned.
There are many government entities that claim your taxes, they live only to serve themselves. When you ask them why I have to fill out this form, why I have to do that, they can’t tell you. They just say, well, it’s the law, and for those who are quick to be critical, just sit down and listen because Jamaica is not the only country going through this. I listened to Keir Starmer make his presentation after I made my pivot speech, and it was as if he took my pivot speech and reread it, and he made sweeping changes or will make sweeping changes. He spoke about the NHS, spoke about digitization and other things, but it’s not just Keir Starmer. I mean, I don’t want to draw on Doge in the United States, but just up the road from us in the Dominican Republic who would be in our peer group, they recognize this and they’re moving swiftly ahead to make their bureaucracy agile.
We have to rethink the dense layer of bureaucracy that we have placed on our public servants. They don’t want to innovate or take any risk less their names be dragged mercilessly in the public domain, that is not going to help us grow. I keep saying there are those who believe that they can deal with corruption by shaming people, destroying people’s reputations, but they will never speak about inefficiency. They will never examine a system for its inefficiency and what cost us as Jamaican taxpayers is inefficiency.
Oftentimes, the flip side of corruption is inefficiency, and if you want to deal with corruption, deal with inefficiency. Treat with the systems that move slowly, treat with the systems that have circuitous regulations because, in systems that are efficient, there is no room for corruption because efficient systems by definition are transparent systems. So when we talk about addressing the bureaucracy of Jamaica, we want to make our bureaucracy transparent. We want performance to be evaluated so that you can see and match effort to outcome so that there is no secret veil that separates someone’s effort versus outcome and that’s where we have to move with dealing with bureaucracy.
This project, in my estimation, should have been at least a year and a half earlier. Our growth has been delayed and we accept it because there’s a thinking in our culture that if it didn’t take long, it wasn’t well done. That’s very strange for the fastest people in the world.
So, Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the IMF made a presentation recently speaking about the global challenges as a result of the emerging trade conflict, and in her presentation, which I thought was very sobering and very thoughtful, she said that she is not expecting that there will be a recession. However, she is expecting that there will be a slowdown and they will probably come out with revised figures for global growth, and she is also expecting that there will be some inflation but no hyperinflation, which is I think a reasonable expectation but bear in mind, that it is just an outlook. It all depends on the moving parts that we cannot at this time predict where they will go.
But she also said that when these major changes are happening globally, it is the small countries that are impacted the most. Small countries are impacted the most. Jamaica has been this way before. In the 70s, there was a global move to increase oil prices. Again, many of you were not born, and some of you were there, but how you appreciate what was happening, you may not have had this perspective on it, but countries that control an important global resource oil, (OPEC), decided that they would come together and control or rather increase the price of oil internationally, and that led to massive economic dislocations in Jamaica, precipitated a dead crisis for Jamaica. How did we manoeuvre ourselves in that period of time?
And the truth is that the impact from the 70s and the 80s followed us through to now. Are we any different today facing these global changes in international trade than we were 40 years ago, 50 years ago, when global oil prices changed? Is our economy any different? And I will say to you that the fundamental principle of this government is that Jamaica must be economically independent. Michael Manley had his own way of saying it. He said, self-reliance. It’s essentially the same thing, but not necessarily always the same thing, but the same principle. We must be economically independent as a people. And how are we different today?
Today, our policies are very much aligned with what the head of the IMF has pointed out. She said a lot of the vulnerability of small countries is because they are highly indebted or are facing climbing debt. Today, Jamaica is still relatively indebted, not highly, but the difference is we have policies in place that are driving down our debt even in the face of crisis, even when there are politicians who would say ignore reducing the debt, spend, now. We have not done that. We have remained committed to driving down the debt so that when the global shocks occur, which they will, Jamaica will be able to withstand those global shocks and the impacts on you and your life will be minimized. Jamaica is totally different today than it was 50, 40, 30, or even 20 years ago.
Secondly, she says that we must build infrastructure to mitigate against climate impact, and that is what we have been doing. If you look at this here, this is exactly what this Agro Park is, we are building infrastructure that will mitigate the impact of climate. But she also said that we have to improve our regulatory and bureaucratic environment in order to be agile and that is the next stage of our government policy now, to pivot to create a competitive advantage with our bureaucracy and let me just quickly say why that is important.
Just up the road from us, the Dominican Republic has landed a major investment which is as a result of the change in global supply chain because of the change in trade policies. It’s a multi-billion US dollar investment into their economic free zone. Why did they choose the Dominican Republic? One, they do have labour and there is some arbitrage in wages. Secondly, they have an established special economic zones, been there for almost 60 years with specified incentives. We have just built ours and we will build out the Caymanas economic zone.
Thirdly, their bureaucracy is more agile and responsive to foreign investment and so if Jamaica is to compete in its peer group, the way in which our intellectuals and some of our public opinion leaders think about our society will have to change and understand that what they held sacrosanct a decade ago does not hold today. We must be agile. We must become efficient. We must become more productive and we must become more peaceful as a people. And that is what this administration is driving for, that is not with any sugar coating, that is not with any beautiful speaking, that is just telling you what the realities are.
I appeal to you in this promising season, to pay attention to the global trends and consider which administration can best handle these difficult seas that the ship of Jamaica faces, who can best carry us into safe harbour and who has been carrying us in these difficult waters without any form of collapse, without any form of overturning, without going astray, running a ground; it is this administration. This has never happened in the history of Jamaica, every week, I’m in the field doing this handing over major project, turning on a water supply, housing scheme, everything we’re doing because we have been a working government, not a promising government. We are a working government. We are delivering to the people and we do it bearing in mind that our development must be inclusive.
You have approximately 700 acres here at Parnassus, a old sugar plantation. These were sugar cane lands, and we have allotted 400 of those 700 acres specifically for small farmers. So I don’t want to hear this argument that we leaving out the small man out of development, rubbish. Everything that we do, we think about every sector of Jamaica so we’re making sure that our small farmers are incorporated and included right here at Parnassus. And then out of that, we have allocated certain acreages for women, youth, and persons with disabilities. This is what development looks like.
I should also say that there were some people farming here before, and we sat with them. Some of them are here, we said you are farmers, we love you and respect you but we’re not in the chacha chaka business. And I know you’re not comfortable in a chaka chaka business. You want to be properly recognized and so they made sure to give you proper lease arrangements. Some of you went to HEART and got trained, that’s how we take care of our people. Two hundred and forty farmers were trained, that is what growth and development, and inclusive government looks like so all dem a talk and a call-up mi name, dem can’t get me out of the game.