The Governor of the Central Bank of Barbados Cleviston Haynes will deliver the quarterly review of Barbados’ economy, next Wednesday, October 28 at 11:00 AM. In recent years Barbadians have become numb to the performance of the economy as we battle with a high debt to GDP, high unemployment, low national productivity to name three key performance indicators.
The pandemic expectedly served to stress the fragile state of the local economy and according to the mid year review of the economy by the Central Bank in June 2020 – see Central Bank of Barbados Review of the Economy January the economy saw a sharp decline that was the trend across sectors, EXCEPT, for Agriculture which saw a 3.7 percent expansion in non sugar agriculture.
For many years Barbados Underground has pleaded with government to allocate additional resources to the food sector. Barbados is surrounded by the sea with an abundance of fish, a mature poultry and pig industry and with declining sugar production available land space to plant root and other crops to grow the agriculture sector. It is heartening to see non sugar agriculture output trending upwards and expect that next week the trend will continue when the Governor delivers the quarterly report. A good news story forced by the pandemic we have to admit.
Related Link: Carmeta’s Corner
Last year government launched the Farmers Empowerment and Enfranchisement Drive (FEED) to increase domestic agricultural production with the objective of enticing more young people and the use of technology into farming. In 2011 Barbados Underground featured the Aquaponnics project located at Bairds Village – Baird’s Village Aquaponics Project, A Case Study For Homegrown Success. Finally Mr. Hinkson, a pioneer of the technology in Barbados is getting the recognition he deserves.
See video on the FEED programme:
https://www.facebook.com/gisbarbados/videos/1845889902240930
It is no secret one of the factors negatively affecting the agriculture sector is praedial larceny. Successive government have paid lip service to introducing measures and enforcing existing laws to protect farmers and the sector. If we are serious about increasing and sustaining output, we MUST address the scourge of praedial larceny. If it were the tourism sector we know the calvary would have been summons by government to lend assistance.
That said we should be encouraged by the growth in non sugar agriculture and continue to improve by increasing technology and education in the sector. Let us guard against crop theft AND leverage opportunities CARICOM can provide. We lack the land space to benefit from scale and the small size of the domestic market to keep price points low to compare with the competition. The following report on the Caricom Agriculture and Food security Task Force is instructive and we pray for its success so that we continue to move the agriculture output needle in the right direction.
See GIS report:
CARICOM Agriculture & Food Security Task Force Established
by Cathy Lashley | Oct 21, 2020 |
CARICOM now has a Food Security Task Force to ensure that member states make agricultural development a priority.
This was disclosed by Barbados’ Ambassador to CARICOM, David Comissiong, recently, as he gave the Barbados Government Information Service an update of new initiatives under the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) at his Culloden Road office.
Ambassador Comissiong explained that the task force was implemented to ensure that the region does not experience any deficit in food supplies and that the agriculture and food production sectors were enhanced.
He said: “This initiative is intersecting with the Barbados National FEED (Farmers Empowerment and Enfranchisement Drive) programme. The Government has a programme in place to bring on board 2,000 new farmers to seriously enhance Barbados’ capacity to produce its own food and agricultural produce.”
The envoy added that as it was announced in the Throne Speech, additional resources would be put in place to establish and develop “new markets across our landscape”.
“So, clearly, one of the responses to the crisis (COVID-19 pandemic) is for Barbados to produce much more of its food. Right now, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign exchange purchasing food from outside our CARICOM region. So, if at the regional level and at the national level we could enhance our food production, then in a situation where the tourism has collapsed [and] we are not bringing in the foreign exchange, we can get around that need for foreign exchange by producing more of our food,” he stated.
https://gisbarbados.gov.bb/blog/caricom-agriculture-food-security-task-force-established/
Bring this back when the bye election is over.
Your comment exemplifies what is wrong with the country. A by election in the agriculture belt of SHN should have food security and agriculture being discussed on the political platforms.
David
We are sure that you are well aware of this, but we state yhethe obvious anyhow.
American foreign policy is predication, on amongst other things, the export of their argricultural and agro- industrial production to countries of the world.
So it is not by accident that Barbados was forced to import “edible substances’ , not real food.
Why we must have supermarkets as the colonial structures dispensing this foolish food. No wonder we have the levels of diabetes, hbp, cancer and so on.
Should Barbados choose to not comply, you will find that loans, WTO violations etc may be implicated.
Carmeta Fraser tried hard but today her thinking represents the most radical thing Bajans could do.
Imported “foods” are kept too cheap to make domestic production able to transform the industrial distribution system.
No amount of backyard gardens could significantly impact this structure.
@Pacha
Many years ado the blogmaster heard Comrade Bobby Morris making the point (in summary) that one of the greatest challenges which small open economies had to face was the first world creation called ‘globalization’. With it our way of life; type of clothes we wear, commodities and services we buy, how we educate ourselves, how we EAT and feed ourselves. We are here now. How do we unfreeze and at the same time propagate an indigenous way of doing? It is not as easy as some of the coggers on the blog would have us believe. We have all these external forces constantly targeting the Barbados bubble. We almost seem helpless to repel/resist.
@David,
i am one of the coggers altho i believe you are older than i am. this is one of your better posts.
the reason old coggers warn bajans about cultural penetration is because they have lived in the systems that bajans seem to admire and they know these systems are bollocks and not all what they are made out to be.
but bajans seeing these people returning and living comfortably think that there is gold in the US, Canada and the UK and all you have to do is get there and pick it up off the street.
they dont know the insults you have to endure, the systemic racism that has to be ignored or overcome, the two faced colleagues you put up with, the unhealthy food that you have to resist and the cold and unfriendly conditions with which you have to contend.
so it is quite startling for many of us that when we return to see bajans wasting time and money to live like people over and away. they want to eat their nasty food forgetting the ground basic foods that sustained us. they want to wear their clothes – i see bajans wearing sweaters. why? they listen to their music, watch their TV and emulate their behaviour. and they we realise that the life we left in Bim and thought we were returning is gone and replaced by a cheap copy of the life we thought we had left over and away.
we try to warn bajans but they dont want to believe you. perhaps they think you dont want them to get thru like you did or you are being over dramatic. you then realise that there is nothing you can say that will make them believe you so you say nothing and just shake your head and chuckle
it is quite a disappointment because Bim can be a great place to live once we are honest with each other and believe in our selves and our way of life.
mind you there is a lot to be learnt from living over and away but it is not what it is cracked up to be.
i like the climate in Bim altho the heat gets me sometimes. i like how relieved i feel when that burden seems to lift from my shoulders when i land at GAIA. i like the authentic bajan food and i seek out such places to eat. i like the beaches and generally driving around visiting my old school friends and other returnees. most of all i like the people friendly and open.
David
Correct. It’s impossible to properly understand anything in Barbados unless we locate whatever problems we have within the contexts cited.
Some here often refute this reality but both parties, and maybe the thirds, will of necessity so think about issues in this way.
Have we ever heard anybody, for 50 years, given a buget speech without an analysis of the global, regional environments?
Pacha, you should write an article on this. Especially how the Americans forced Aristide to disenfranchise the Haitian peasant farmers. That in itself was a criminal act.
Dame Bajans
Will try. We have become interested in the politics of food security because of the need to know where it comes from, veganism.
And the politics around food are no less vicious than other forms of economic warfarism.
The way forward is to radically and quickly invest in modern agricultural techniques and fisheries. This does not need any long winded intellectual discussion. If we don’t have the expertise to execute , we can bring them in. They come and tell us how to borrow money; we can get others to come in to assist with other things.
When the Chinese were building the Gymnasium, they were fishing in the St. Lawrence Lake and feeding themselves.
I say no more.
@Greene
You are absolutely right. However it will not go down well on BU. I have been saying for ages that the worst treated group in the UK since the second world war has been Caribbean people, we have even invent ed a new hyphenated word for them, Afro-Caribbean.
Yet, only recently I have had someone coming on BU claiming I have celebrated the so-called multicultural UK society. In reality, the great social division between Caribbean people and Africans is that Caribbean people came mainly in the 1950s and 60s and had to endure horror; the Africans came mainly in the 1990s, after the civil wars, so the circumstances had changed, both in the UK and what drove them to the UK.
The Race Relations Act was passed in 1965, then again in 1968; and again in 1976; but the 1976 act was passed after the 1975 Sex Equality Act because Roy Jenkins, the home secretary, thought the nation would not stand for it. Brits had to be soften up with women’s equality first.
Those experiences have shaped the two groups’ outlook. Britain looks like Heaven to the Africans, and it has been Hell for the Caribbeans.
The remarkable thing is that Caribbean people have endured that brutality and have gone on to live outstanding lives and, given their children and grand children opportunities that they could not even dream of those years ago.
In the 1960s and 70s the Brits thought Caribbean people were not intelligent to be teachers or youth workers; to work in offices; to be police officers (many were recruited to serve in the army); and even in nursing, they created a bogus qualification, the state enrolled nurse, because they thought we could not qualify to be State Registered Nurses. The list goes on.
@ Greene, they may be related to us, but they know zilch about our lives in the UK – and do not care.
@ William
We may tip toe round the problem from generation to generation, but the bottom line is that we are collective failures.
@Hal,
i know Hal.
i have tried telling them to get back to the basics. there is much money and business to be generated in the authentic bajan food business.
my children and many of their friends white and black and African, would like to come to Bim for a good ole bajan time replete with bajan food, music etc..
they have heard so much about it that they want to experience it. but alas all we do is see tourists as white and offer them european type dishes that i doubt they want.
i see many tourists at oistins enjoying what is labelled bajan food and atmosphere with the old men in the background there playing cards and dominoes and having a good time.
MAM tried with her invitation to bajans to return and celebrate every month in a different parish but sometimes that came over as a gimmick and didnt seem long lasting but to be fair she tried and it wasnt a bad idea. COVID put paid to that but i hope she doesnt give up on it as a long term project
we must build up our fruit and food bank and we can make a tourist thing out of it. have tourist come and see how fruits and other consumables are grown and taste them right off the tree. there is so much we can do in terms of food.
@ Hal
The greatest failures have been our generation. We declared ourselves middle class and then overnight we all became experts in everything outside of how to effectively manage ourselves. Our parents got most of it right; we got most of it wrong. There are people on this blog who seek only to impress and all they do is regurgitate Fox and CNN then pretend or infer that the Caribbean is some backwater place.
Anybody on this blog seriously believes that Biden, Trump or Johnson put together have the intellect of James, Lamming or Williams. But we seem proud dissecting these idiots.
We just so frigging brilliant it’s frightening.
Peace.
Dame Bajans
Of course, your reference about Haiti had to do with how the Americans by forcing the Haitian government to buy cheap rice imported from their redstate farmers destroyed ten of thousands of Haitian small farmers.
Tens of
@Pacha
The challenge it seems is that we have allowed our way of life to be overridden by our taste for other things. The reality however is that notwithstanding what has transpired managing food security has taken priority. The economic indicator is trending in the right direction, the utterances from the MOA suggests there is more to come. Let us continue to be the best advocates. Maybe COVID 19 is the great disrupter and represents the tipping point.
@ Hal
Conservatively, over the years, I have sent at least seven hundred people to Barbados. They have each in turn told a minimum of about ten or more. But what the hell do I know. I don’t live ‘bout there; never run a bread shop and want the island to fail.
Peace.
@ William
You may remember the days when your mother had to make money stretch from pay day to pay day. You got a daily meal by ‘trusting’ ie taking credit out with the local shop keeper.
Those were days when poorly formally educated mothers, we did not call them housewives, demonstrated an economic superiority that was remarkable.
They will send you to get a quarter ounce of butter, an onion, a pig tail, two pounds of yam, some ‘English’ potatoes, and a gill of cooking oil, etc, enough to cook a meal. Tomorrow will look after itself.
Then we ‘progressed’ to what we used to called cash and carries, now called supermarkets. The change is in the name.
We took credit with the local shop keeper and when we had money we spent it at the supermarkets. The generational decay is not just in Barbados. We have it too in the UK and it is painful.
My way of dealing with it in the UK is exactly how I deal with it on BU – I have no advice for them, no suggestions, instructions, no lifting them up when they fall, unless they approach me for help.
I see it in Barbados every time I visit. We are always the clients, the customers, never the owners or providers. It is a failed society.
David
We are not as hopeful as you seem to be.
What those who believe in free markets and so on don’t tell us is that there is nothing free about markets.
Meaning, food markets are no different and uniquely subject to the protection of vested interests.
You can plant all the backyard vegetables yuh want. Or the MOA could make all the political plans he wants. But stopping importation, agro-industrialization and achieving self sufficiency will attract the attentions of market defenders.
@Pacha
Barbados is a small market, some suggests we should be able to fly under the radar to avoid the defenders you mentioned.
BU has become a kind of oldie goldie radio talk show, where the old timers call in and reminisce fondly on the good old days.
Don’t you lot get tired of rehashing the same effluent over and over?
The Barbados you grew up with is gone forever. It is not coming back. It is never coming back.
You guys want Bajans to do more farming but where is the land for them to farm? Land in Bim is very expensive; and anyone from anywhere can buy a piece of the rock and just leave it there or build mansions. Then we have situations like where one individual own most of the arable land in St Lucy.
Even if a few Bajans do get a lil piece o land to farm who will stop de men from tiefing the crops with impunity?
On top of that, there is a sort of cultural aversion to agriculture among the Bajan negrocrats. They speak about agriculture in purely abstract and theoretical terms. Never in practical terms.
Agriculture will only be taken seriously in Barbados when there is no other way to get a plate of food.
David
For fear of good example a message will be sent.
They dont see smallness as lovingly as you do. We’re talking about hundreds of millions imported annually. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
@Dullard
Agreeing with you this morning.
@Pacha
We are at a point where something has got to give.
David
These orders of magnitude might appear to be irrational to some.
But only by the world exiting all the present arrangements can Barbados enter a path of sustainability.
The architecture can take us no further.
Dey not fair either
@ Hal
Correct. I don’t think anybody expects us to go back. However we expect to go forward with a plan, not running to the IMF every other week!
Enlightened discourse is usually not a good companion for some.
Great post, Comrade.
@ William
Thanks. What I find rather strange is that the president, this brilliant woman, has all the fiscal tools to reverse this downward trend and is trapped in ineptitude.
I am also surprised that Prof Persaud, the great economist, who has certainly seen better, is either not advising the president of better fiscal policies, or is being ignored.
Either way he has got to abandon his cultural love of money and adopt a principled position, even if he thinks being ‘principled’ is a digital game.
I can come up with more suggestions, but seeing what they have done to @PLT’s remote workers idea, I won’t if it was to save them from an economic storm. Let them drown.
@ William, the small shop keepers can form a wholesale cooperative to cut out the middle man by importing own-label produce and saving millions. As far as I know, it has never even been on the table. This is where government can give a lead.
Two cheeks of the same backside.
Can’t get a “six-punce” between these two.
@David October 23, 2020 9:21 AM. “We almost seem helpless to repel/resist.”
We need to start in infancy. Six months maternity leave so that all mother’s can breast feed their babies.
Guess how many millions of dollars we spend on importing breast milk substitutes, when breast milk is free.
At the nursery level government has to take the lead by feeding the children only tropical, preferably only local foods, locally produced cow’s or goat’s milk and locally produced ground foods sweet potatoes, yams, cassava, okras, spinach, eggs, chicken, fish, pork etc. [I understand that some of the inputs must be imported] Our excellent nutritionists can come up with menus suitable for children aged 6 months to 4 years. Share these menus with the parents of young children so that they too can do the same at home.
The school meals program should be based on ground food, fish from within our 200 miles economic zone.
So that our grandchildren relearn what their great grandparents knew.
Nowadays Bajans think of rice and peas and macaroni pie as special Sunday food. But my grandmother who died in 1969, never cooked rice as her Sunday food, my father who died in 2006 NEVER ate macaroni pie. If my accident we put it on his plate he would say “please take it off my plate.” She died at 90, he at 94. I pray for the same for my grandchildren. In my grandma’s time soup was Sunday food. I am sure that some of our young people would be surprised to hear that. Mixed grain soup, that is whatever peas and beans were available, a piece of mutton from whoever was slaughtering a sheep or goat, or a yard fowl, or no meat at all, and that was delicious Sunday dinner. I still cook a pot of soup most weeks, and my little 20 something Susie who is over and away does the same, or buys a bowl from her neighborhood Jamaican restaurant.
We do not have to be so dependent on imported food. We have to re-teach and re-learn to love what we can grow here.
We CAN make decisions for ourselves. The WTO etc. are not Gods.
Tomorrow morning make your own decision buy a breadfruit instead of a box of macaroni. What is stopping us?
If we did not pick the craft din-din off the supermarket shelf, then the supermarkets would not import it.
@Hal Austin October 23, 2020 10:24 AM “…they may be related to us, but they know zilch about our lives in the UK – and do not care.”
We all have family who who moved to the U.K between 1940 and the present.
In my case 3 siblings, one aunt, one uncle, 1 child, 2 nephews, and I am just your very ordinary Bajan. Some stayed for a year or two, some stayed for more than 40 years. Some of the recent migrants were full time students, but ALL have spent time in the U.K workforce, some a lifetime, some vacation jobs. Some worked as maids and truck drivers, some of the more recent one have worked in the “elite’ profesions.
We know how our Caribbean families have suffered.
We have no illusions about life in the U.K.
@Pachamama October 23, 2020 10:09 AM “And the politics around food are no less vicious than other forms of economic warfarism.”
The politics around food is the most vicious of all, because there is much we can do without, but food, we can’t do without food.
Must have really annoyed those silly Brits when my young mother aced that SRN exam!
Steupse.
I had a beautiful day in Barbados today. Ate lamb stew and lentil pie and planted some cassava and sweet potato. Peas to be planted tomorrow. Going out now to transplant lettuce, cucumber and carrot seedlings.
Bajan life still continues in my sphere. I plan to enjoy this November Bajan style.
The USA cannot stop me from planting my food. The USA cannot make me buy their nasty food off the shelves. Ever so often stuff has to be recalled.
Pacha, I think you have seen too much for your own good. You should have stayed ignorant like me.
Donna, you are on the ball. Very few people realize that seedlings should be transplanted in the evening and watered in the mornings, especially in hot humid climes.
Dame Bajans,
Yeah, I do my research. I have broken the rules a few times when some other chore or lack of energy stopped me from doing it on time.
Evening transplant and morning watering works better, though.
Is it not somehow an joke of history? For 200 years our natives have feared the plantation business like the devil fears holy water. Now they call for the plantation. Sir COW was once again the prophet: he has lived on the plantation for a long time.
@Greene
Ditto. My sentiments exactly. Sometimes i chide myself as i no longer recognize the Barbados/bajans i once knew.
@Tron October 24, 2020 5:58 AM “Is it not somehow an joke of history? For 200 years our natives have feared the plantation business like the devil fears holy water. ”
Why do you seem surprised that HUMANS fear bad treatment, no or low wages, physical violence and hunger? Don’t all humans fear those things?
Stupssseee!!!
However our history did not begin nor end with the Middle Passage. We have always farmed, we will always farm. BUT we do it for ourselves. Our profit is our profit and our loss is our loss.
Either you are ignorant or pretending to be ignorant. Humanity originated in Africa, and humanity will end in Africa, hopefully not for a few million years more. We were the first farmers, we spread humanity to the whole world. We understand that we come into this world having created nothing. We understand that we have to live worthwhile lives. We understand our history, we understand our work, we understand our potential.
I will continue to grow food to feed my family, my neighbors, my friends. I give most of it away. Because I can afford to. I know that farming is dignified work. Even while my grandparents were working on the plantation, they continued to work land on their own behalf. My grandmother and her sister [my greataunt Mary was born in 1858, twenty years after ‘legal emancipation”] shortly after put their pennies together and started buying their own plots. My family has farmed from the beginning of time, we will continue to do so until the end of time. Even in the dreadful days of plantation slavery, and the dreadful 100 years which followed “legal emancipation” we endured, we will endure, we will survive, we will thrive, we will prosper. And we will do it without enslaving or exploiting others.
That is real-real humanity.
Thankfully I have never gone to sleep hungry a single day in my life, even though one of the Bajan haters on this blog made a snide remark a few days ago about people who have difficulty buying themselves a decent meal, and about people buying half an ounce of butter and half an ounce of oil. Grew up making our own butter, kilos and kilos of it. Had no shoes, but always had a belly full of good food.
Good girl that, Renata Clarke. Always knew she would end up trying to make a difference. Still got her Angela Davis books on my bookshelf.
I know she will be pushing the agenda hard.
When I called thrm fossils I get cuss. Happy yo see someone calling then old fogeys…lmbao. Who the 🐈 likes he licks. The villas bout Bim gine be burrrrrst just now. Wunna laughed at me then tuh..🤣
We discussed vending recently. Here is today’s Nation editorial.
Why should a local retailer want to import pumpkins if there is local supply? There must be more to the story?
David,
I am growing more optimistic about the prospects of agriculture and its offshoots.
There are more people interested than one would think. When I buy seedlings and walk about with them in the nearby supermarket ALWAYS somebody excitedly asks me where they can find them. I purchase them from a nearby store. People also pass and compliment my efforts in the garden every day. I am certain that if I sold seedlings and garden supplies I would make some sales.
People no longer think of farming as a degrading occupation. Attitudes are changing and farming and its offshoots are looking “sexy”. So is entrepreneurship on any scale. Even my nine year old cousin has started a business.
I have perceived that there emerges a new attitude among average Barbadians that wards off the doom and gloom others seem to be feeling. I don’t hear a lot of complaining. Rather, I see a facing of reality, an adjustment in thinking and a determination to prevail.
And most Bajans still have a ready smile.
Keep posting the news!
@Donna
So far so good. Like you the blogmaster is (quietly) optimistic.
@ Donna October 28, 2020 9:12 AM
Why not get into the production of dasheen, the growing ‘celebrity-famous’ root crop on the healthy eating block?
Miller,
Not going commercial. Too late for me. Never even ate dasheen but I’ll try a few eventually, I’m sure.
Right now I am looking to see what can be done with my aloes. They are looking too lovely to just sit there. I could mix up a home brew for myself.
When is Carmeta Fraser going to celebrated, officially, as a national heroine?
If Sarah Ann Gill (a former slave owner) can be so ‘anointed’ why not Carmeta and Nanny Grigg?
Google dasheen bush. I think Trinis use it for callaloo. Don’t waste the bush.
“Although he did not identify the business or state the quantity the retailer was looking to bring in”
This is one of the reasons why these problems surface over and over.
A reluctance to call names. Cowardice.
Starting the 2nd week of May 2023 I’ve planted yams, sweet potatoes, sweet peppers and pumpkins, Will plant cassava soon.
Good showers now including an almost full day of rain on May 22nd.