Monitoring Agricultural Drought in the West Indies - Monitoring and Predicting Agricultural Drought: A Global Study - page 148

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46

The West Indian territories composing the Sugar Association of the Car-
ibbean (Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and St.
Kitts) estimate earnings from the 2000-01 sugar crop to be $261,370,000
from a total export of 638,017 tons. The 1999-2000 earnings were
$310,000,000 from 685,877 tons exported (The Gleaner, 2001), and the
major earners were Guyana, Jamaica, Belize, and Trinidad and Tobago.
The importance of sugar is further illustrated by the fact that, for Jamaica,
sugar supercedes the combined economic value of all other leading crops—
banana, coffee, and citrus (Planning Institute, 2000). In Jamaica, where
unemployment is about 15.5% (Planning Institute, 2000), sugar provides
direct employment to some 36,500 persons. Approximately 46,000 ha are
under cane cultivation, with an annual sugar output of just greater than
200,000 tons from nearly 2.3 million tons cane (SIRI, 1999). The estimated
economic losses from poor crop yields, crop failure, and livestock fatality
due to widespread drought in Jamaica, attributed to the 1997 El Niño
event, was $1 million (Office for Disaster Preparedness and Emergency
Management, 1999).

[148

Line
——
0.0
——
Norm
PgEn

D rought Monitoring in the West Indies
Agricultural drought monitoring in the West Indies is largely restricted to
determining the presence of ongoing agricultural drought. It is generally the
responsibility of the Ministries of Agriculture in the individual territories
or other appointed bodies. In all cases monitoring of agricultural drought
by these bodies consists of monitoring two sets of indices: a set of simple
rainfall indices to determine when meteorological drought has set in, and
a set of equally simple agricultural production indices to determine when
production levels are abnormal with reference to a base year.
The island of Jamaica is divided into 14 parishes, which are further sub-
divided into 4-5 agricultural extension areas each. It is the responsibility of
an agricultural extension officer to collect both the rainfall indices and the
agricultural production indices. The subset of rainfall indices are reported
by an agricultural extension officer to the parish supervisor on a monthly
basis. The indices include the number of rainfall days per month, the to-
tal rainfall received for the month, the highest rainfall received, and the
days on which it was received. These are supplemented with similar data
representing the means of the same indices for the same region and for
the same time of year as calculated from data collected over a number of
years. A comparison of the collected and mean values is used to determine
if a meteorological drought occurred during the month.
Similarly, a subset of production indices is also collated by crop type
for the region. These include hectares planted during the month and to
date, hectares harvested during the month and to date, hectares currently
growing, yields per acre, and total production in tons. As with the meteo-
rological data, these are also supplemented with similar data for both the
previous year and for a reference year which was deemed a good produc-

[148