Monitoring Agricultural Drought in the West Indies - Monitoring and Predicting Agricultural Drought: A Global Study - page 149

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tion year for the region on the basis of yields. The comparison between the
collected and mean values determines anomalies in the agricultural pro-
duction levels.
It is on the basis of both the reported monthly values of the rainfall and
production indices that the ministry determines whether an agricultural
drought is in the making. If the meteorological drought has continued (on
the basis of previous month's reports) and there is at least a 5% reduction
in production levels, then a drought alert is issued for the region. If the
drought condition persists for consecutive months, it leads to a severe
drought.
Agricultural drought is monitored in the other islands of the West In-
dies by monitoring both rainfall and production indices and by comparing
these indices. This is true of both government-designated institutions that
monitor domestic crop production and the privately funded institutes or
large-scale producers of export crops. In some cases, however, the Jamaican
subset of indices is augmented by one or more additional and easily mea-
sured indices as deemed relevant by the particular territory's monitoring
institute.
It is generally true that for the West Indian region, the use of more
complex drought indices such as the Palmer drought severity index, the
standardized precipitation index (chapter 9), rainfall percentiles, or the
crop moisture index, is not common in agricultural drought monitoring
and management. Departures from the norm (calculated or intuitively de-
duced) are largely used to determine the presence of ongoing drought and
to develop mitigation strategies.

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R egional Drought Monitoring

In 1991, by an Agreement of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Com-
munity, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency (CDERA;
www.cdera.org) was established. The primary function of the CDERA is
to make an immediate and coordinated response to any disastrous event
affecting any participating state, once the state requests such an assis-
tance.
Drought is one of the disasters to which CDERA reacts. Using the
knowledge of the impact of El Niño and La Niña in the region, CDERA (in
conjunction with other institutions) issues to the heads of government of its
16 participating territories information regarding the likelihood of drought
conditions for specific periods of the El Niño event. The information also
includes the potential impacts of the drought on various sectors including
agriculture and ways to mitigate them.

D rought Monitoring for Sugarcane

Figure 11.3 shows the major sites and ecological regions in which sugar is
produced in Jamaica. Roughly a third of the industry occupies the relatively