The Democratic Labour Party’s spokesperson on Agriculture and Fisheries, Amoy Gilding-Bourne, has labelled Barbados’ food import bill a national security risk.
Responding to the Weekend Nation’s stories yesterday on the issues farmers faced and the comparison between local production and imports, Gilding-Bourne, an attorney, called for an emergency acquisition and production action plan.
“This island’s staggering $957 million annual food import bill is a critical failure of economic governance and a direct threat to national food security. It is unacceptable that our local farmers produce only $300 million in food annually while we depend on overseas supplies for over 70 per cent of what we consume.
“This is not just an agricultural deficit; it is an unsustainable drain on our foreign reserves. The current administration’s passive approach to agriculture has left our food security vulnerable to global supply shocks and climate volatility,” she said.
Citing the data from the University of the West Indies’ Centre for Agricultural Research and Innovation, Gilding-Bourne stated that Barbados was “haemorrhaging” $77 million annually on just four categories of food: 10.2 million kilogrammes of fresh produce, 2.15 million kilogrammes of beef, 1.12 million kilogrammes of pork, and 500 000 kilogrammes of mutton and lamb.
As such, she proposed that an immediate response from government should include launching targeted grant programmes for local blackbelly sheep farmers and introducing temporary feed subsidies to immediately scale up local pork, beef, and mutton production.
“We cannot afford to keep farming out our food security to foreign nations. Our farmers have the skill; they simply need a government with the political will to back them,” she said.
Meanwhile, the acting chief executive officer of the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation, Dr Claire Durant, said they had introduced its Bajan Harvest Hub to work with farmers supplying speciality crops to the tourism industry, as well as the Crop Escalation Programme, which targets 16 traditionally imported staple and vegetable crops for local production.
(CA)