Millions in Donated Fertiliser Handed to MPs With No Proof Farmers Ever Received It

A performance audit of Jamaica’s Production Incentive Programme has exposed a $2.941 billion agricultural support initiative riddled with weak internal controls, politically influenced beneficiary selections, and a complete failure to demonstrate results for the farmers it was designed to serve. For a country that imports the majority of its food and repeatedly pledges to strengthen domestic agriculture, the findings reveal a programme that could not account for where its resources went or whether they made any difference at all.

When Jamaica received a donation of 72,000 bags of Moroccan fertiliser valued at $349.4 million, it represented a windfall for a farming sector that has long struggled with the cost of inputs. For smallholder farmers across the island — the men and women who grow the food that ends up on Jamaican dinner tables — the donation should have translated directly into reduced costs, healthier crops and more productive land. Instead, a new audit by the Auditor General of Jamaica has found that more than 11,000 of those bags, worth approximately $54 million, were handed to Members of Parliament with no mechanism to verify whether a single farmer ever received them.

The Auditor General’s performance audit of the Rural Agricultural Development Authority’s management of the Production Incentive Programme covers the five-year period from April 2019 to March 2024. The programme, overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining, received $2.941 billion in government funding over that period and spent $2.798 billion — a 95% utilisation rate that, on the surface, looks like an efficiently run operation. What lies beneath that figure is considerably more troubling.

The Production Incentive Programme exists to support Jamaica’s agricultural sector through the provision of seeds, agrochemicals and other farm inputs. Of the $2.798 billion spent, $1.238 billion — 44% of the total — went into seeds and agrochemicals. Irish potato seeds alone consumed $731 million across five years. These are significant sums drawn from the public purse, directed at a sector that employs tens of thousands of Jamaicans and forms the foundation of rural economic life across parishes from St. Elizabeth to St. Mary. The question the audit set out to answer was whether that money actually achieved anything measurable. The answer is that, in most cases, it is impossible to know.

The Auditor General found that only 29% of priority crops under the programme met their performance targets. That figure is alarming enough on its own. But the deeper problem is that 54% of priority crops had no clearly defined targets against which performance could be measured at all. Without targets, there is no accountability framework. Without an accountability framework, there is no way to determine whether public money delivered public value. The remaining 17% of crops fell short of their targets due to weather events, pest infestations and disease — challenges that are real but that also underline why a monitoring framework with clear metrics is indispensable, not optional.

This is not a minor administrative shortfall. Jamaica’s food import bill runs into billions of dollars annually. The persistent gap between domestic food production and national consumption is one of the most consequential economic vulnerabilities the country faces, driving up the cost of living and exposing household budgets to global commodity price shocks. A programme receiving nearly $3 billion over five years to stimulate local agricultural production should, at minimum, be able to demonstrate whether it moved that needle. The audit makes clear that RADA could not.

The fertiliser distribution story is perhaps the most damaging finding in the report. Jamaica received 72,000 bags of Moroccan fertiliser as a donation. Of those, 11,026 bags — valued at roughly $54 million — were allocated to Members of Parliament for onward distribution. RADA had no system in place to verify whether those bags reached actual farmers. No documentation confirms farmer receipt. No follow-up validation was conducted. The bags left the warehouse and entered a distribution chain managed by elected politicians, and from that point, the paper trail effectively disappears.

An additional 3,809 bags, representing 5.3% of the donated stock, were classified as damaged or discarded. That is a significant loss from a donation that cost Jamaica nothing to procure but considerable resources to store and manage. The audit found no perpetual inventory system in place — meaning RADA maintained no running record of stock received, issued, and remaining. Instead, a single officer was responsible for all warehouse functions, from receiving goods to recording transactions to issuing stock. This absence of any segregation of duties is a foundational internal control failure. In any well-governed organisation, no single individual should have unchecked authority over all stages of an asset management cycle.

RADA disputed the audit’s characterisation of the fertiliser allocation, asserting that “all fertilizers distributed through RADA are done transparently.” The Permanent Secretary stated no awareness of any directive regarding MP fertiliser allocations. These responses raise their own questions. If the distribution was transparent, the documentation to prove it should exist and should have been available to auditors. The fact that auditors found no verification mechanism suggests that whatever transparency existed was informal and unverifiable — which, for purposes of public accountability, amounts to the same thing as no transparency at all.

The audit’s findings on beneficiary selection compound these concerns. Of 752 beneficiary forms reviewed, 49 lacked required signatures — a basic administrative requirement that protects both the programme and the farmer. More significantly, 210 bags of farm inputs were distributed to individuals and companies who did not appear on any approved beneficiary list. The criteria by which beneficiaries were chosen also raise questions about whether the programme was reaching those most in need. MP recommendations drove 29% of beneficiary selections. Needs-based assessments — the stated purpose of the programme — accounted for only 42%. When political referrals account for nearly a third of who receives public agricultural support, the programme’s integrity is compromised regardless of whether those referred were genuine farmers.

Underlying all of these findings is a staffing crisis that makes meaningful programme delivery almost impossible. RADA’s extension officers — the frontline agents responsible for advising farmers, monitoring crop performance and validating input use — are spread at a ratio of one officer to between 1,500 and 2,000 farmers. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations recommends a ratio of one officer to between 800 and 1,000 farmers. RADA’s ratio is, at its best, nearly double the acceptable maximum and, at its worst, more than twice as stretched. The monitoring unit responsible for programme oversight had a single officer, who completed only 24 of 36 planned field visits during the audit period.

These are not abstract governance concerns. When extension officers cannot reach farmers in sufficient numbers and frequency, crop problems go undiagnosed, input use goes unvalidated, and the technical support that turns a subsidy into a productivity gain simply does not happen. The farmers who depend on the programme — many of them operating on small plots in rural communities with limited access to credit, technology or markets — are the ones who pay the price for this institutional gap.

RADA’s response to the audit was mixed. The authority committed to implementing a perpetual inventory management system, developing a beneficiary prioritisation matrix, and improving documentation practices. These are meaningful commitments if followed through. RADA also partially accepted findings on monitoring and beneficiary selection. However, the authority disputed accountability for MPs failing to submit distribution sheets, a position that sidesteps the core issue: RADA was the custodian of public assets and bore the institutional responsibility to maintain records of their disposition regardless of how the distribution chain was structured.

The Auditor General’s most pointed warning came at the end of the report. Both the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining and RADA were cautioned that their practices expose them to the risk of surcharge under the Financial Administration and Audit Act — the legal mechanism by which public officers can be held personally liable for losses of public money resulting from negligence or breach of duty. This is not a routine observation. It signals that the Auditor General assessed the control failures as serious enough to potentially trigger legal consequences for the individuals responsible.

What the audit ultimately reveals is a programme designed with good intentions but implemented without the architecture necessary to make those intentions real. A $2.941 billion investment in Jamaican agriculture over five years should produce measurable improvements in crop output, farmer incomes and food security. Instead, the programme produced a 54% rate of unmeasurable outcomes, a politically entangled fertiliser distribution with $54 million unaccounted for, and a monitoring operation so under-resourced that it could not complete its own scheduled visits.

The path forward, as the audit outlines, requires more than procedural fixes. Clear, measurable performance targets must be established for every crop supported under the programme. Beneficiary selection must be documented against objective criteria, insulated from political referral processes that cannot be audited or challenged. The extension officer corps must be expanded to levels where meaningful farm-level engagement is actually possible. And any distribution of public assets — whether procured by government or received as a donation — must be subject to end-to-end accountability systems that do not rely on the goodwill of any single officer or the cooperation of any elected official. Until those foundations are in place, the Production Incentive Programme will continue to spend public money without being able to demonstrate what it bought.

Jamaica Accountability Watch is an independent editorial series by Jamaica Homes News examining what government audit reports reveal about the management of public money. Source: Auditor General’s Department of Jamaica.

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