By Regina Selman Moore
There may be a role for young farmers to play in reducing Barbados’ high food import bill.
Acknowledging that the island’s current food import bill is too high, Minister of Labour, Social Security and Human Resource Development, Senator Dr. Esther Byer Suckoo has noted that a lot of the food imported can be grown here.
As such, she told young farmers graduating from the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture’s (IICA) Youth Farm Programme, that there is a role for them to play in this process. She was at the time delivering the feature address during the Graduation Ceremony held recently for participants in IICA’s 2016 Youth Farm Programme, at Building #2, Harbour Industrial Estate, St. Michael.
“In Barbados, our national production per capita has declined, most notably in the fruit and vegetables category. The Ministry of Agriculture, Food, Fisheries and Water Resource Management reports that Barbados’ food import bill is almost half a billion dollars,” Minister Byer Suckoo revealed.
She also made mention of the Barbados Economic and Social Report for 2015, which shows that local vegetable production declined by 4.2 per cent during 2015, when compared to the previous year. However, vegetable imports registered an increase of 16.3 per cent. The main commodities which are imported, which registered increases, were tomatoes, which increased by 57 per cent, cabbages by 24 per cent, lettuce by 22 per cent, melons by almost 20 per cent, beets and carrots by 19 per cent and sweet peppers by 17.7 per cent.
“Those are crops which you can grow here and sell here and make a decent living of it. Think of the foreign exchange that we would save and the money that our farmers would earn, if instead of importing, they had the means to supply our market,” Byer Suckoo noted.
She later added, “If we are serious about not importing food and reducing that high import bill, it means that there are many opportunities for those persons who are interested in agriculture, especially for our young people, to be able to make a living.”
“We rely on them because it is not sustainable for a small economy like ours to be spending that much money on importing anything. We must return to the land and we must eat what we grow,” the Minister stressed.