Caribbean: Salination causing decrease in arable land

-(Gleaner) The increasing possibility of more arable lands in the Caribbean falling out of production because of salination (lacking in organic content on account of rising sea levels and salt-water intrusion) is of great concern to the region’s agronomists.

Professor Emeritus of the University of the West Indies, Nazeer Ahmad, said some 9,000 hectares of land in Jamaica are out of production because of saline-water intrusion. The case is even more chronic in some other Caribbean nations.

Ahmad was addressing the topic of ‘Soil water-management system for a drier Caribbean’ at a Climate Change Adaptation in Caribbean Agriculture workshop hosted by the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute and the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CARDI), as part of the Caribbean Week of Agriculture activities.

He insisted that an urgent need for water management of agricultural lands must be addressed if the region is to maximise crop production.

Case studies were presented by Stanley Rampair, about a variety of irrigation systems in St Elizabeth, Jamaica; and by Greg Marshall about irrigation best practices of a farm in Barbados.

Other issues up for discussion at the three-day event which ended on Thursday included: climate variability and change and water availability in the Caribbean, managing water resources under a changing climate and adaptation strategy for agriculture in the Caribbean, in relation to declining water resources as a result of climate change.