EVEN THOUGH BARBADOS is producing a “significant” portion of the food consumed locally, an industry executive says the true levels of self-sufficiency are hard to measure.
“I think we have to find ways of bringing agricultural statistics,” CEO of the Barbados Agricultural Society, James Paul, said yesterday.
“How do we gather them? . . . We are not accounting for a significant amount of production that goes on in the island.
“In some cases, like vegetable production, we have no way of gathering it because of the ways that people can get access to the material are very informal, and you can’t document those ways,” he said.
“With poultry there are some ways that we could gather them and to ensure that we have some level of certainty in what the level is like, but sometimes some of the ways that people could get accuracy in material is through informal ways [and] it is the same for pig production and sheep production.
“There is no way for us to authenticate how people can get access to that material and that is where the problem is.”
