“Where There Is Land That Is Unutilised, I Will Make It Available”: A Minister Backs the Baptist Union’s Castor Bean Plan

• Minister Daryl Vaz committed government land to the Jamaica Baptist Union’s castor bean project
• Phase one covers 1,000 acres of castor bean farming
• The project aims to create wealth across about 337 Baptist church communities
• The report put the US market potential at $80 million to $100 million

Jamaica’s Baptists have a long history of linking faith and land, from the free villages after emancipation onward. In March 2017 that tradition took a modern agricultural turn. The Jamaica Observer, carrying a JIS report, said Daryl Vaz, then Minister without Portfolio in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, had committed land to the Jamaica Baptist Union’s Grow Castor Bean Project.

“I am the minister with responsibility for land (and) where there is land that is unutilised, I will make it available,” Vaz said. He described a Jamaica in which the public and private sectors “work together to drive investment and production.”

The project, led by project director Dr Judith Johnston, aimed to create wealth in the roughly 337 communities where Baptist churches are located, through growing and processing castor beans. Phase one involved 1,000 acres of castor bean farming across several parishes, with some land belonging to the Sugar Company of Jamaica Holdings Limited already in use. The report put the potential market at $80 million to $100 million in the United States and more than $200 million globally. Beyond jobs, the project was meant to build skills in agronomy, land stewardship and business.

JBU general secretary Karl Johnson and Janice Robinson Longmore, chief of operations at Jamaica National Bank, were also involved, pointing to a partnership of church, State and finance.

The project was a rare example of a Jamaican denomination treating land as a source of production and income for its communities, not only as the ground under its chapels. For churches with idle acres, and for government agencies holding unused land, it offers a model: pair land with a real market, a business plan and a financing partner. For diaspora Baptists and others who want their giving to create lasting income at home, community agriculture on well-secured land is one of the more practical ways to do it.

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