Crop boost

With concerted efforts on to ramp up agricultural production, special focus in being placed on ensuring that there is “clean planting material”, especially with respect to certain root crops like sweet potatoes.

In bringing these plans to fruition, Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Indar Weir, says 88 acres of land is being set aside to ensure access to critically important disease-free germplasm, so farmers can get the most from their harvests. Through this initiative, he said the Ministry will develop a germplasm bank to facilitate the collection of local varieties of crops.

“The technical people call it germplasm, in my layman terms I call it nurseries, because basically you are planting material under controlled conditions to make sure you have clean material for the farmers to plant. Our focus is on sweet potato, cassava and yam. We have been working with the Food and Agriculture Organisation to have clean planting material for sweet potato in particular, because we keep repeating the planting material and it is prone to disease which would lead to reduced yields,” he explained in an interview with The Barbados Advocate.

His comments came as he indicated that the Wakefield Plantation, formerly owned by CLICO, is being brought back into production and will be used for this purpose. Minister Weir said the St. John property has more than enough acreage to engage in such a project, and steps are being taken to ensure that the land has good access to water, to ensure the success of the initiative.

He said that to date they have drilled a new well to assist with the water supply.

The Agriculture and Food Security Minister said that the goal is to ensure, especially during this time with the threats posed by COVID-19, that there is an abundance of root crops available for persons to consume.

“We don’t want to run out of sweet potatoes, we definitely need to bring back yams and focus has to be placed also on cassava. Cassava has been having a problem as well, where it is very small and long and we need to correct that,” the minister stated.

He added, “The fact is, agriculture has had several challenges over the years that were not addressed and I am hoping to be able to address all of them over the next nine to 12 months. All of the diseases we have with the root crops I am trying to address those by the creation of the nursery. Yam for example, all of what we have is basically planting material and so Bajans don’t get a lot of yams to eat, because we have to plant what we have”.

On the topic of cassava, Minister Weir added that there is also interest in increasing the production of local cassava flour, but he explained, in order to achieve this there will have to be buy-in from the private sector. Rather than keeping that production anchored at the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (BADMC), he said the buy-in of the private sector is essential, as the “scale” required cannot be realised only by the BADMC.

“So this is a conversation that is currently ongoing with the private sector, with the idea of passing on to the private sector all of the necessary expertise that they would need, so that they can move ahead with producing the flour on a larger scale,” he added.
(JRT)