KINGSTON, Jamaica – The Banana Board says 116 banana and plantain farmers will begin receiving payments totalling J$20 million (One Jamaica dollar=US$0.008 cents) following the destruction caused by the passage of Hurricane Melissa on October 28.
Banana Board general manager, Janet Conie, said that the payments would be made to the farmers who were registered with the Catastrophe Insurance Fund and will be disbursed those affected following damage assessment by the team.
“We will disburse those claims and those farmers can access what we think is the most important thing for resuscitation – fertilisers – which they will have. The fund aims to disburse within a month,” Conie said.
“Now this is important, because for recovery from a disaster, recovery from windstorm, recovery from breakage and from uprooting, you need to replant, you need to resuscitate the fields and you need to do it very quickly,” she added.
Conie said the Board will work with farmers to provide the necessary technical assistance they need to ensure that they are in a strong position to recover quickly from the hurricane.
“You need to chop back, and before every hurricane season and through a year, we teach you how to resuscitate. That’s our role. And so, when the farmers had this blow, within two days, some farmers were already in their field chopping back. We had a meeting last week on the catastrophe fund… and farmers who were represented on the committee said they were 50 per cent chopped back,” she noted.
“Chopping back is a commercial term that we use for actually going into your fields, clearing the mats, clearing the roots for the first and most important element, which is fertilisation, because you need to fertilise to make the next generation come up.
“You select your sucker for the next generation, you fertilise, and if you do that and put on that fertiliser no later than six weeks after, then you can have a reaping in seven months,” she explained.
