Low cotton yield

Poor field maintenance and pests have significantly hurt this year’s cotton harvest.

Chairman of Exclusive Cottons of the Caribbean Inc. (ECCI), Anstey Scott, disclosed that the harvest was “significantly below” the actual orders that ECCI has received from its European customers.

“In essence, we would earn far less foreign exchange than we could have due to poorly maintained fields and failure to control pests. We are challenged by the decline in agricultural output, commitment and enthusiasm. Having recognised the reluctance of farmers to plant due to lack of human harvesters, we began to search for ways to facilitate a higher return for our farmers through increased mechanisation and consequently achieve for each farm and worker a higher harvesting yield,” he stated.

Scott stressed that better practices need to come to the fore, including scouting to identify pests before they reached the crop and mechanical weeding.

Admitting that the Agriculture Ministry had answered the farmers’ cries on these challenges, Scott nevertheless remarked that “one-off” responses could not end the problems.

Saying that the products of ECCI were in high demand by tourists, he stated, “I can guarantee that if we address the productivity in the field, increase the yield of cotton harvesting to meet and outstrip orders as well as build linkages with big brands, Barbados would earn a significant sum of foreign currency.”

He was making remarks at the launch of the Exquisite Local and Caribbean Products Exhibition put on by the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies’ Centre for Food Security and Entrepreneurship at the Limegrove Lifestyle Centre.

Saying that agriculture in the country was a far cry from what it was in the past, he insisted that now was the time for innovation and doing more with less.

“Doing more with less manual labour, less weeds, less pests and less of that attitude which says ‘things should remain the same,’” he said, noting that this could come in the form of smart partnerships to gain foreign exchange, and increasing food output. (JMB)