EDITORIAL: Focused on agriculture

While the COVID-19 pandemic has caused challenges for many sectors, one sector that it seems has flourished, no pun intended, has been agriculture.

 

Early on, even as the country had to lock down in those initial weeks following the first COVID cases, we were assured that the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security was working to ensure that there was minimal disruption in respect of food production, and it appeared to reap success. Far from disruption, there were reports that there was as much as a 16 percent increase in non-sugar production in the first six months of 2020, despite COVID being at our doors, and we heard too that Government was seeking to press additional acres into use to help boost production even more.

 

Additionally, we heard that as part of the concerted efforts being made to ramp up agricultural production, special focus was being placed on ensuring that there was clean planting material, particularly for root crops like sweet potatoes, cassava and yam. The nation was also told that Government was targeting possible protein sources, seeing chicken and rabbits as the best options to pursue. The goal was to ensure that there would be an abundance of locally grown food available for persons to consume, especially given the threats posed to imports by COVID-19.

 

Government was not the only one pushing the idea of agriculture, we well remember the number of vendors who started popping up all over the highways and byways of this country, selling all manner of produce. Certainly this helped many a person to become gainfully employed and earn a living to support their families during those initial dark days. Many have continued to sell produce and many more have started to get into farming as a means of supplementing their income.

 

It has often been said that agriculture is key to helping to rebuild the economy and it appears that it has proven its worth since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is certainly hoped that more persons will be attracted to agriculture in the coming months, and get into for the long haul, for sadly many of those pursue it, see it only as a stopgap until they can find something “better” to do, or see it just a hobby.

 

It is hoped that Government’s efforts over the last few years with its Farmers’ Empowerment and Enfranchisement Drive (FEED) Programme, which has trained several hundred new farmers; the decision to increase the acreage under production; and the investments being made in the sector generally, will help more persons to embrace the sector and see beyond the fork and hoe mentality that has so often held the sector’s potential back.

 

That idea that agriculture is too labour intensive, tedious and low-paying needs to be abandoned. Yes for anything to be successful, you must be willing to put in the work, but there have been several advancements in agriculture, such that everyone does not have to engage in back breaking work in fields. Certainly the Government has been promoting that, as it has been training persons in a variety of areas such as apiculture, aquaculture and hydroponics. They have been pushing the idea of greenhouses and even freight farms, where persons can use the technology that is available to get into the business of growing food on a smaller footprint, which given our limited land mass is a good idea.

 

Our ultimate goal should be to achieve food security, but to do that we must not only encourage more people to get on board, but efforts must be made to ensure that the requisite environment that would allow them to be successful is put in place. It means that the financial sector must see agriculture as a true part of the private sector and be willing to offer financing to advance it, and there must also be strong legislation in place to protect those investments against praedial larceny, which remains a major concern.

Barbados Advocate

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