Tough to digest: From high hopes to hollow yams

WESTERN BUREAU:

It’s just before midday, and farmers in Wood Grove, Trelawny, are taking a brief respite from their demanding work, emerging from the fields for a much-needed lunch. The day is relatively dry and sunny, yet they describe it as the calm after a storm. This year’s hurricane season brought relentless rains and extreme weather, devastating crops and causing significant losses.

Wood Grove, part of Trelawny’s ‘yam belt’, supplies both local and international markets with the prized Trelawny yam, a staple in Jamaican cuisine. Despite its reputation for quality, farmers in this region are struggling due to unpredictable weather patterns. In addition to yams, crops such as cabbage, carrots, and corn have suffered substantial damage.

The Atlantic hurricane season, from June to November, is always a source of anxiety for farmers, who face heavy rainfall and severe weather. This year, two storms – Hurricane Beryl in July and Tropical Storm Rafael in November – caused widespread damage, while rains persisted for months.

“From the start of the year, I have lost three crops of cabbages because of the rain. The two hurricanes blew down the yam sticks, and getting them back up was very expensive. I have never seen so much rain in all of my life and I am 67 years old,” bemoaned Greg Taylor, a small-scale farmer in the rural community.

Tomar Green, another yam farmer, described how excessive rainfall had decimated his crop with a significant portion rotting in the ground.

“They all burn up because of too much rain. I can’t even dig 150 yams because everything is burned. The outside is black like when you roast yam. It burn up the sweet yam dem, too,” Green told The Sunday Gleaner.

He grows a variety of yams, including yellow, sweet, and renta yam, but noted that the damage had been widespread.

“The yam dem also spring like dem hollow because of too much rain. Mi carry yam to MoBay market and the people dem complain to me every week, so I stop go market for now. The last time I went to MoBay market, mi sell yam for $400 per pound, and by the time it reached 2 p.m., it was $150 a pound because some of the yams were hollow,” Green lamented just over a week ago.

The impact of climate change on small island developing states like Jamaica is increasingly concerning. According to the World Bank Group’s Climate Change Knowledge Portal, the country faces serious threats from rising temperatures, droughts, floods, and even sea level rise.

Rising costs

Veronica Reid-Mendez, a farmer in Wood Grove, explained how the rising costs, driven by the need for expensive fertilisers and yam sticks, are placing more pressure on customers’ pockets.

“It is driving up the costs because farmers are going through nuff. Fertiliser and yam sticks are expensive, so we have lots of problems, which is why the food goes up in the market. It is hard. Last year, we didn’t get anything like this, so this year has been hard,” Reid-Mendez reflected.

Following the Category Four Hurricane Beryl in July, the Ministry of Agriculture estimated a $4.37 billion loss in the sector with some 48,852 farmers affected.

“The hurricane’s wrath spared little in its path. Domestic crops saw us losing approximately 18,700 hectares of our vegetable lines, with damage estimated at about $1.95 billion affecting 40,000 farmers. Crops that were most significantly impacted include sweet pepper, tomato, lettuce, cabbage and carrots, and vine crops like melon [and] cantaloupe suffered a significant blow,” said Minister Floyd Green.

“Fruit trees suffered a heavy blow; 890 hectares of fruit trees have suffered damage, most of them were completely lost, estimated at $337 million [and] affecting 1,470 farmers. Tuber crops [such as] yams [and] cassava, covering 1,670 hectares, have been lost, impacting 1,120 farmers and estimated at $524 million,” he added.

Jamaica has two rainy seasons, from May to June and September to November, with dry spells in between. However, recent years have seen unpredictable weather, which has cost farmers millions. Faced with extended dry seasons with intense dry spells sometimes even going into the rainy season, several small farmers struggle as they depend on rainfall for irrigation.

But unstable, unpredictable weather is not the only concern farms now have to deal with. The changing climate has been linked to the spread of plant diseases and pests across the island.

Jeffery Facey revealed that his yam crops in Wood Grove have been affected by yam rust disease, which has claimed over 700 hills of his negro yam this year.

“Next year, I am just cutting it down to half [and] that is if I can plant back half because it was very bad and I didn’t get any [government] help,” he told The Sunday Gleaner.

Yam rust, caused by a fungal pathogen and distinguished by symptoms such as yellow spots or pustules on upper leaf surfaces, has spread across Trelawny, Manchester and St Elizabeth. It causes the tubers to shrink in size by up to 90 per cent.

Biologist Damion Whyte pointed out another threat: the New Guinea flatworm, an invasive species that preys on earthworms, which are essential for healthy soil.

Big threat to our agriculture sector

“Some of our pests are invasive and climate change affects the spread. The New Guinea flatworm is a big threat to our agriculture sector because they eat our earthworms. This worm has shown up in several parishes. It is black and has a pointy head. It has been showing up a lot during the rainfall, and it normally comes out at night,” he told The Sunday Gleaner.

Whyte said while there no formal research on the flatworm has been conducted locally, there is an urgent need for monitoring and action.

“What we do know is that in some countries, it has led to the decimation of earthworms and snails,” he said, stressing that earthworms are vital to soil health. “The crops won’t [thrive] if you don’t have good soil health.

“It’s a big issue internationally, but we don’t have it on our radar yet and the problem is, by the time we put it on our radar, it might be out of our hands,” he said. “We need to support some of the people who are doing research and the Government needs to take [a look] at the impact of some of these invasive species.”

Dr Dale Rankine, an applied climate scientist, suggested that the agricultural sector will likely need to focus on more climate-resilient crops. He explained that crops like yams, cassava, and sweet potato require less rainfall after the initial planting phase, and excess water can cause them to rot.

“When you have high rainfall at the wrong time, you tend to have rotting of the roots, in the case of yams, because they don’t require that much rainfall towards the middle of the crop. That creates a problem for farmers,” Rankine told The Sunday Gleaner.

He urged farmers to adopt sustainable land management practices to mitigate the effects of extreme rainfall.

“The latest climate report, called the State of the Jamaica Climate Report, ... showed that we have been getting more rainfall in May-June than September-October in the last 25 years, so we have a change,” said Rankine.

“We have to have contouring systems and facilities that help to harvest rainfall, but one of the challenges I saw with a number of our farmers when I went into the field is that we don’t have proper drainage systems. They tend to have ponding, so the water accumulates in the area and, of course, if there’s no place for the water to run off, then you will have just an avalanche and excess rainfall on the land itself,” he said.

Rankine acknowledged that there are cases where little can be done to lessen the effects of climate change on the farmlands, “especially if the soil accumulates water over a long period and there’s no proper drainage”. He, however, believes crop diversification may offer some relief.

“Maybe now we have to look at some crops that can tolerate different extremes of weather. If you’re having very dry conditions, cassava is a good crop, but if you’re having unseasonably wet weather, some crops do better in those conditions. I think cocoa is one of them that farmers tend to even farm right at their standpipe because it loves water,” he said.

Meanwhile, Rankine told The Sunday Gleaner that he vividly remembers a case where bananas exported to the United Kingdom were returned to a Caribbean island, calling it a “classic example of why we have to note the nexus between climate and agriculture”.

“A shipment of bananas was sent back from the UK without a single case being opened. It was refused and the reason was because they were told that the bananas were too curved. The government was very concerned and research was done. It was found that the amount of rainfall that the banana receives when it is ripening determines the curvature of the banana,” he said.

“The rainfall pattern had changed, but the farmers were farming the same thing, not taking note that. If the rainfall pattern changes, then when you farm, it has to be regulated with that so that your ripening season coincides with the high rainfall,” said Rankine.

rochelle.clayton@gleanerjm.com