(Barbados Nation) The Caribbean has a food import bill of almost $4 billion and regional policy-makers must prioritise food production to meet the region's consumption needs.
Outgoing Caribbean Com-munity (Caricom) Assistant Secretary-General Byron Blake made this call during a discussion at the Caricom Secretariat in Georgetown, Guyana.
Blake said the agriculture industry had been on the decline globally, having provided employment for many in the Caribbean, and regional policy-makers should make food production a priority and as a means of reducing the growing food import bill.
He said the food import bill was approaching US$2B and was significantly higher than the 1974 bill of US$400M, as eating preferences were influenced and largely fed by mass media advertisements.
In a world where natural products were in high demand, Blake added, Caricom needed to seize the opportunity to structure its agriculture industry to provide some of these products.
In this vein, he suggested that regional agriculture policy-makers closely examine the food-based needs of the world with a view to enhancing the sector's productive capacity.
The outgoing Caricom official suggested that output had impeded the region's traditional agriculture over the years, due to the inability to identify and utilise fertilisers and pesticides that would assist the quality and quantity of harvest.
"We have to organise it in a way that it can be competitive, and we have to look at it differently, in terms of including small farmers who will produce quality that is delivered on demand," Blake said.