How can we reduce our food import bill?
We know that we cannot grow all the food we need, but despite what the armchair philosophers who regularly pontificate on the radio call-in programmes claim, local production, if well organized, can have a significant positive impact.
First, there must be a serious effort to curb crop theft and stray dogs and other animals in order to make investment in agriculture more attractive.
We import product which we do not need, supposedly to satisfy our increasingly sophisticated tastes. Earlier this year, Minister of Agriculture Dr David Estwick reportedly appealed to Barbadians and cautioned them that their continuing taste for foreign products would have a long term effect on the economy.
Armchair experts claim that we can import anything we grow here more cheaply, so why try to improve self-sufficiency. As the minister pointed out: “Every time Government has to pay an import bill with foreign exchange for items that . . . can be produced in Barbados, it means that if Government is not producing that quantity of foreign exchange, it has to borrow. If Government has to borrow that foreign exchange, then it has an impact on the fiscal deficit of the country.”
Instead of adopting a defeatist attitude, we need to look at each category of import (see table) to determine the feasibility of growing some of the products which are being imported as well as substituting some similar product which is easily produced locally.
If we start by looking at the meat category, in 2010, we imported $16.9m. in beef products, $12.7m. in pork products, $15.2m. in lamb, and $3.9m. in poultry products.
We continually say we do not have enough land area to produce beef, yet thousands of acres are lying idle under bush.
What happened to all the research done on silage production, pasture improvement, sorghum production and so on which was done in the 1970s and 1980s? What happened to all the knowledge gained from foreign experts on ageing and cutting meats?
We have made some progress with pork, and visitors often comment on the high quality of our pork products. But we need to do more. Also, if we stop importing pig trotters and edible offal in brine, we would reduce the bill by about $1m.
We continue to boast that Blackbelly lamb is the best in the world, but we seem more interested in protecting the breed than doing anything meaningful with it. We need to improve our pastures and our production conditions if we are to produce lamb at a reasonable price.
Poultry appears to be one of our more successful livestock industries, and this is borne out in the import figures. The majority of poultry imports are turkey wings, necks and backs which are needed for the lower income consumers.
During the coming weeks, I will look at each food category to try to determine what we can achieve locally to reduce the import bill.
The Agrodoc has more than 40 years’ experience in agriculture in Barbados, operating at different levels of the sector.
