(6 Sep 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Manchester, Jamaica – 22 August 2024
1. Various of Kyacian Reid, farmer affected by hurricane Beryl, weeding crops
2. Reid looking at her field
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Kyacian Reid, farmer affected by hurricane:
"It was going so well. I planted melon and sweet pepper and a week before the storm I picked four bags of sweet pepper and left a lot under the tree, saying that I was going to come back to pick it. But I couldn’t wait for the next day to come and when I came here everything was gone."
NASA – MANDATORY CREDIT
AT SPACE – 1 July 2024
4. STILL: Hurricane Beryl as seen from the International Space Station
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Clarendon, Jamaica – 4 July 2024
5. STILL: Woman retrieves belongings from her home
6. STILL: Man walking past a house destroyed by Hurricane Beryl in fishing settlement
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Manchester, Jamaica – 22 August 2024
7. Members of United Way of Jamaica delivering cheque from the Farmer’s Rehabilitation Fund to Reid
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Kyacian Reid, farmer affected by hurricane:
"What I did have before is nothing. What I received now, it’s going to take me very far away."
9. Reid weeding watermelon field
10. Watermelon
11. Fields beside sea
STORYLINE:
Alance Wisdom got inside her home just in time to watch the ceiling of her front room collapse.
As the rain rushed in, a violent wind ripped at the roof, piece by piece.
“Everything just fell,” said Wisdom, 79, of the day in early July when Hurricane Beryl, the strongest July Atlantic hurricane on record, skirted Jamaica’s southern coast. “Before dark, everything was on the ground.”
The flooding destroyed nearly all of Wisdom’s belongings in the small, brightly-painted home she’s lived in for more than 30 years.
Below the steep hill her house sits on, two acres of land where she grew cabbage, sweet peppers and cucumbers were flattened.
“That’s what we depend on, and there’s nothing to sell,” she said, sitting outside her tarp-covered home on an especially hot day in late August.
Two months after Beryl, thousands of farmers like Wisdom have still not recovered.
The hurricane caught many in Jamaica off guard. A storm of its magnitude had not hit since Hurricane Gilbert in 1988 — and the island’s south coast, which bore the brunt of the damage, is typically less prone to hurricanes than the eastern side.
The blow to the agricultural industry impacts all of Jamaica, where 85% of fresh food comes from the country’s own producers.
Market prices for certain fruits and vegetable prices skyrocketed since the storm, if they can be found at all.
Last week, local plummy tomatoes cost nearly three times what they did in December.
The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining estimates that Beryl caused $6.5 billion JMD in agricultural losses.
Jamaica’s government has pledged more than two billion Jamaican dollars ($12.77 million) to help farmers recover.
But with nearly one-fifth of its 250,000 producers impacted, most have not yet received direct aid, and the needs go beyond supplying seed and restoring irrigation lines.
The humanitarian organization CORE estimates around 1,500 farmers lost their roofs.
Many growers rely on sales from the summer harvest to pay their children’s enrollment fees for the new school year.
“Without helping meet these basic needs, growers can’t get back to work,” said Taneshia Stoney Dryden, CEO of the United Way of Jamaica.
A portion of the fund focuses specifically on female growers, who make up one-third of the country’s registered farmers.
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