Close to 900 trained in FEED progamme

The Farmers’ Empowerment and Enfranchisement Drive (FEED) programme continues to be a successful initiative for supporting local small farmers.

CEO of the state-owned Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (BADMC), Frederick Inniss said over 800 persons have so far been trained in the programme, despite a number of challenges still affecting the initiative.

Speaking in the Lower House on Friday during the 2023-2024 Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure debate, he said: “Over the course of the last 18 months, we have had a significant push, both on the front in terms of training [where] we have trained over 880 through the FEED programme. The major limiting factor is the access to lands. While we have a land bank available to us, those areas do pose challenges for agricultural production, water in particular, but also in the slope of the lands.

“We have been working to allocate persons throughout those plantations that we have care of. The current total who have been allocated to this point is 252 persons across 343 acres of land in various districts,” he explained.

Meanwhile, Chief Agricultural Officer Keeley Holder, who responded to queries from Member of Parliament for St Andrew Dr Romel Springer on the current state of agricultural production in the rural parish, said that the Scotland District still posed significant challenges to most forms of farming, and that a relook of agriculture in the parish must be done.

“We need to look at an agricultural structure that focuses on fruit trees, that focuses on conservation, it focuses then on ensuring that we are moving water into catchments. These have to be the basic tenets of how we design any agricultural programme for the Scotland District.

“It also means that in terms of land clearing, if we want to do a farming enterprise, we don’t go into the Scotland District and clear huge amounts of land at the time and leave it then without vegetation, because that creates its own erosion,” she said.  (SB)