#BTColumn – Farming in Barbados

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author(s) do not represent the official position of Barbados TODAY.

by Peter Webster

“Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses.” – Anon

An entrepreneur is: “a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money” or “a person who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.”

Does the average Barbadian realise that some of the most important entrepreneurs in our country are our farmers?  These intrepid compatriots: employ a significant number of people; create opportunities to add the most value (3 times what they produce – input supply, transport, handling, storage, processing, packaging, distribution and marketing); save foreign exchange; grant us a modicum of nutrition and food security; and carry the most risk to their investment.

This risk often amounts to more than BD$5,000 per acre per crop through factors over which they have little or no control such as: wind and drought; pests and diseases – including thieves and monkeys; and market gluts.

Our farmers’ job is to make a living for their family and themselves, not to feed us. Feeding us results from them making a living.

Yet our farmers are the only producers who buy their inputs at retail prices, sell their products at wholesale prices and pay most of the transportation costs.  At the same time, our farmer’s market is, for the most part, consumers who can least afford to buy their farm product even though it is a necessity for the consumer.

It is those consumers who can least afford to pay for food that essentially determines the farm gate price and the farmer’s income, a farm gate price that is less than 40 per cent of the market price which you and I have to pay.  This means that 60 per cent goes to all the intermediate players who have little risk.

As a result, many of our farmers are “sucking salt” and failing. I have witnessed a poor, Black Barbadian farmer standing next to his field of onions, in which he had invested more than BD$10,000, with tears streaming down his cheeks because his onions had started to rot and he had no buyers for them.  Apparently, a merchant had imported onions just when the local crop was to be harvested.

Such imports are supposed to be strictly regulated through a licensing system, for such imports to occur some rules and regulations must be contravened, yet it appears to occur on a regular basis.

Our country should be protecting, helping, supporting and facilitating our farmers, yet it would seem that the opposite happens. Other countries not only do all of these for their farmers but actually subsidise their farmer’s production to the benefit of their entire population.

What have we done to: control the farmer’s skyrocketing price of inputs; improve irrigation water supply; stop crop theft; and control the monkey damage?

Lots of “hot air” about legislating crop theft and eliminating the monkeys and we have even more crop theft and monkey damage than before. Now we are proposing to triple the price of irrigation water!

Is it surprising therefore that these entrepreneurs in Barbados are able to state that “if the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) and the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (BADMC) were to close tomorrow it would make no difference to us.

Those of us who now get our water for irrigation from BADMC could likely get our irrigation water from a different and probably a more reliable source at lower cost, except that there is legislation which grants the Barbados Water Authority and the Barbados Government a monopoly on water supply.”  In essence the farmers are supposed to subsidise the inefficiencies of the state-owned enterprises. To whom can the farmer pass on these increases?  Those who can least afford to pay for them.

Evidence provided by the United Nations suggests that the time is fast approaching when World food supply will not meet the World food consumption demand, at which time we will have difficulty finding food to import at any price and our farmers will suddenly become the most important people in our country.

It is high time that the civil servants at the MOA and BADMC get out into the field where agriculture is being performed on a daily basis, as opposed to their desks and myriad files being pushed around.

These civil servants need to reach out to the farmers and identify their farming problems and needs and genuinely do everything possible to help and support the farmers, otherwise the civil servants could all go home and would not be missed.

Maybe we should start remunerating our MOA and BADMC staff relative to the amount of food our farmers are able to produce in Barbados.

Round and round we go, like water in a sinkhole vortex…

Peter Webster is a retired Portfolio Manager of the Caribbean Development Bank and a former Senior Agricultural Officer in the Ministry of Agriculture.