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Project Facilitator Micah Gittens engages students visiting the PROPEL booth at Agrofest. Accompanying him was project accountant Angela Arthur Isaac.

Onion production to increase under ‘PROPEL’ Project

Under Canada’s “PROPEL” Project, farmers in Barbados will be producing more onions to sell to supermarkets and also for use in the tourism sector.
The above was revealed by Project Facilitator Micah Gittens, during the recently held national agricultural exhibition-Agrofest. Canada’s PROPEL Project is one which sees farmers in Barbados and other eastern Caribbean countries obtaining support to increase the quality and quantity of fresh locally grown fruits and vegetables and subsequently, broadening links with buyers. PROPEL is an acronym that stands for – Promotion of Regional Opportunities for Produce through Enterprises and Linkages and the project has been implemented through the World University Service of Canada.

Gittens told The Barbados Advocate that via PROPEL, a number of crops are being promoted to increase food security in the region and of late, efforts are on to increase the yields with regards to Irish potatoes, but more specifically, onions.
“We have a number of farmers on the project, some are youth-based, some are females, but the majority are established farmers. We provide them with inputs, and we also have support from the Ministry of Agriculture, as well as the Barbados Agricultural Society, to try to increase the yield of onions,” he said.

“We have partnering on the project, two buyers – the BHTA (Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association) and Massy Stores, who will be purchasing the onions on that project,” Gittens further revealed.

CEO of the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS), James Paul, also gave a bit more details about the PROPEL Project in relation to boosting onion production.

“The PROPEL Project is something that we started long ago, but in a sense, we only got it fully christened last year. This is a project where right now, we are trying to increase onion production in Barbados. Right now we have about 15 farmers involved in the project. We are going to facilitate them in terms of cultivation. They are going to receive seeds, they are going to receive the farming inputs and the objective is that we want to increase onion production, where we are trying to develop a value chain in which we have [entities] like Massy supermarket, who have actually volunteered and we have other supermarkets who are part of the programme,” Paul indicated.

“We are going to help them with the agronomy, to make sure that the crop that they are going to plant, is going to have a reasonable chance of success,” Paul concluded.

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