Ministry refocusing efforts on research and development

THE Ministry of Agriculture, Food, Fisheries and Water Resource Management is refocusing its efforts on one aspect of its mandate, that of research and development.

 

Chief Agricultural Officer in that Ministry, Lennox Chandler, made this known recently.

 

“I want to stress that as long as I am the Chief Agricultural Officer at the Ministry, our focus will be on research and development and this obviously will be supported by agricultural extension, plant protection and agricultural services,” he noted.

 

Chandler went on to state that some persons often overlook the Ministry and turn to institutions overseas for key information about Barbados, when doing agricultural research. However, he issued a reminder that the Ministry has published extensively on a number of agricultural topics and also has produced a number of publications, from which key information is taken by some of these very same overseas-based institutions.

 

“This Ministry has done a lot of work. We have published extensively on tropical agriculture and we are leaders in terms of agricultural information for the entire Caribbean. We are noted for our publications in tropical agriculture, which some of the same universities that you go to and take your information from, put up on their own websites and you go to their website and download it and bypass the Ministry’s website, where you can get the actual original information,” Chandler further pointed out.

 

He added, “I will be first to admit that we in the Ministry would have fallen away from our core responsibility of research and development and publication of research findings, and for various reasons which I am not going to go into now. 

 

But my intention is to reverse that trend. We have to return to our core responsibility of doing research and sharing that information with the farming community and the public at large,” the chief agricultural officer remarked. (RSM)