A screengrab of a few of the produce listed on the ALEX platform.
Jamaican farmers have seen a powerful start to 2025, incomes $40 million within the first two months of the 12 months via the Agri-Linkages Alternate (ALEX) portal, an e-commerce platform designed to attach them immediately with patrons in tourism, gastronomy, agro-processing, and retail.
The determine was disclosed by Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett on the Jamaica Blue Mountain Espresso Pageant’s Farmers’ Commerce Day, held on the College of Expertise, Jamaica (UTech) in Kingston on February 28.
The early earnings set the stage for a record-breaking 12 months, following a profitable 2024 during which 2,000 farmers registered on ALEX provided 4.3 million kilograms of produce valued at $452.8 million to Jamaica’s tourism trade. Thus far in 2025, farmers have provided 81,000 kilograms of produce via the platform, with expectations that final 12 months’s efficiency will likely be simply surpassed.
“We’re going to be effectively over half a billion {dollars} of produce earlier than the 12 months reaches midway if we proceed at this fee, as a result of we’re increasing and we’re rising,” Bartlett acknowledged, underscoring the speedy scale-up of the programme.
The ALEX portal, launched in 2017 as a joint initiative of the Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF) and the Rural Agricultural Growth Authority (RADA), was designed to streamline provide chains by decreasing reliance on middlemen and boosting direct farmer-to-buyer transactions. The platform permits farmers to checklist their out there produce, whereas patrons—together with resorts, eating places, supermarkets, and agro-processors—can place orders based mostly on real-time provide availability.
Bartlett highlighted that the expansion of the Tourism Linkages Community is central to the Authorities’s technique to extend native agricultural manufacturing and cut back import dependency. He pointed to ongoing initiatives to boost farming effectivity and resilience, notably in water harvesting and climate-smart agriculture, as key elements in sustaining the sector’s growth.
“We’re taking a look at new revolutionary methods of enabling bigger and better ranges of manufacturing and much less expensive operations for our small farmers,” the minister stated, noting the Authorities’s dedication to scaling up agricultural output to fulfill rising demand from the hospitality and meals industries.
ALEX’s Challenge Coordinator Candice Constantine has urged extra farmers to register for the platform, noting that it gives them with direct entry to large-scale patrons for gratis.
“These patrons embrace a few of our resorts, restaurant house owners, tour operators, individuals inside the gastronomy market, agro-processors, supermarkets… you title it. ALEX is right here to facilitate these connections,” Constantine defined.
She careworn that the platform not solely will increase market entry but additionally gives backend help via agri-brokers who help farmers with gross sales logistics, serving to them navigate transactions and cut back post-harvest losses.
“You get larger market entry to a number of patrons throughout Jamaica. You get agri-brokers on the backend helping you with the connections, and ALEX additionally encourages native distribution and a discount in importation. We need to get much less losses inside the agricultural sector. So, no farmer ought to be complaining about spoiled produce when you might have ALEX right here to help you to find patrons,” she added.
With a surge in demand from the hospitality and meals processing industries, Jamaica’s home agriculture sector is underneath stress to ramp up output. The Authorities’s push to combine native farmers extra deeply into the tourism provide chain aligns with broader financial targets of import substitution and meals safety.
— Karena Bennett
