Stalled nutrition programme blights school's agri-prospects

Christopher Serju, Gleaner Writer

A GOVERNMENT project designed to supply local fruit juice to the national school-feeding programme is nowhere near to getting off the ground a year after its scheduled start-up date. In addition to local juices, it was anticipated that during the pilot phase, some 600,000 students would enjoy eggs and cow's milk, thus providing a guaranteed market for melon, June plum, and cucumber farmers mainly from the Breadbasket parish of St Elizabeth.

However, the partnership that includes Nutrition Products Limited (NPL) and Jamaica Exotic Flavours and Essences (JEFE), in which Government has a 90 per cent stake, has been stalled by a lack of start-up funding, despite the intervention of Prime Minister Bruce Golding.

"We meeting hell with this thing, hell!" a frustrated Tony Freckleton, managing director of JEFE, which holds the other 10 per cent stake, told The Gleaner. He explained that after being put through a number of hoops by the NPL Board at great expense, he is now looking to go another route.

"We have done from our side everything that we could have done. They put us through the trouble of going to the Bureau of Standards where we had to get a nutritional analysis done at our expense. The line of flavours that we did, the board approved it and said we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Is a lot of work I put into this thing already, you know, going to meetings on top of meetings," Freckleton lamented.