Hon Audley Shaw (3rd right), Minister of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries, cuts ribbon for expanded seed bank facilities with assistance from Therese Turner-Jones (2nd left), Inter-American Development Bank Country Representative, at a handover ceremony held at the Bodles Research Station in St. Catherine on October 23, 2109. Others from left are Dr. Gregory Robin, Country Representative, CARDI, Dr. Lisa Myers Morgan, Principal Research Director, Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Ainsley Henry, Programme Manager, Investment Plan for the Caribbean Regional Track. The seed facility is retrofitted to allow for extraction, cleaning, quality testing and proper storage of seeds. It was refurbished through grant funding of US$200,000 from the IDB and is the first of its kind in the Caribbean.
Jamaica’s agricultural sector’s resilience to climate change has been boosted with the handover of an upgraded US$200,000 seed bank facility at the Bodles Research Station that will improve the station’s ability to increase its seed-producing capacity as well as house seeds of climate-resilient crop varieties. “This is important as it will enable us to have a faster recovery time for the sector in the event of natural disasters as the planting material will now be more readily available for use in the replanting exercises,” said the Hon. Audley Shaw, Minister of Industry, Commerce,...
