The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

BAHAMIAN farming “needs to be revamped in its entirety”, an agriculture group’s head has conceded, arguing that this nation has “no choice but to support its own” with wide-ranging reforms.

Caron Shepherd, president of the newly-formed Bahamas Agro Entrepreneurs Group, told Tribune Business that the COVID-19 pandemic has “illuminated multiple reasons” why this nation needs to improve self-sufficiency and food security by reversing the decades-long contraction of its agriculture industry.

She said she agreed with much of what was contained in a series of Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) reports tabled in the House of Assembly last week, which detailed the fragmented nature of a sector struggling to compete against foreign producers with greater economies of scale and better access to market.

The reports, which have been reviewed by this newspaper, argue that the better farmers tend to operate outside the Government’s packing house and produce exchange system, which has been in existence since the 1970s and was described by the IDB as “more of a paternalistic approach rather than a market-driven one”.

“The lack of organisation has favoured the [growth] of small farmers who sow and harvest the same products at the same time, reducing their bargaining power by not having the individual size to interest wholesalers and distributors,” one IDB report said, in a nod to Bahamian agriculture’s fragmented state.

“Farmers compete against each other in all crops, diminishing their capacity to negotiate. Consequently, quality, volumes, market windows and market prices drop. Generally, farmers are not really aware of market demand, enhanced by the fact of being atomised.

“As a matter of fact, they do not maximise the existing market windows due to lack of information, technology, seeds, and unawareness of the new market opportunities and tendencies. The packing house system has discourage farmers,” it continued.

“The more efficient and market-driven operate outside the system, while farmers more linked to the system produce more traditional crops such as tomatoes, cabbages, sweet peppers, onions and bananas.”

Bishop Gregory Collie, the Bahamas Agricultural and Industrial Corporation’s (BAIC) chairman, in an article today (see page 4B) says payments to farmers via the Soldier Road produce exchange have more-than-tripled to around $800,000 in 2020 compared to $250,000 in 2017.

The packing houses, established in the 1970s, package and grade products received from farmers, who are subsequently contacted for payment when the foods are sold via the produce exchange at the wholesale and retail level. However, the $9,000 maximum on how much can be purchased from each farmer makes it unattractive “with no real buying power”.

And the IDB identified transportation/logistics as an increasing problem for the $4m-$5m worth of produce shipped annually to Nassau. “We conclude that most local agricultural produce on the Family Islands (say 80 percent) is consumed locally,” it said.

“Lack of cooling during transport makes inter-island trade in fresh agricultural produce rather problematic. High levels of waste (up to 50 percent) have been reported at the produce exchange in Nassau in the past.”

The government’s recent policy edicts requiring hotels, restaurants and food stores to source 40 percent of their needs from Bahamian producers, but the IDB report noted that pricing, quality and consistency of supply remain challenges.

Identifying further obstacles to achieving these goals, the IDB report said: “Important local buyers such as hotels, restaurants and supermarkets increasingly require traceability of agricultural produce and certification of all actors along the agricultural value chain, including farmers.

“To-date, no official traceability system for agricultural produce has been put in place, and very few farmers in The Bahamas are certified except for some of the bigger farm corporations.”

Ms Shepherd said her group had already moved to organise Bahamian farmers into groups that specialised in certain products, such as tomatoes and cabbages, so that the industry avoided “a gluttony” of one particular crop at any one time.

Agreeing that Bahamian agriculture needed to first supply the local and tourist market, before trying to realise more lofty export ambitions, she added: “The entire agriculture sector needs to be revamped. It needs to be brought up to today’s standards in a way that has improved technology.

“We need to first chisel away at the 40 percent we can supply to the local market. The only benchmark we can match that to is the tourism industry being open, and enabling us to supply the hotels. Once we’re able to supply the hotels and local market, then and only then can we look to export. We need the government to put a moratorium on imports so the supply we have in-house can go to the local market.”

Optimistic that “the growth and turnaround” in agriculture will begin in 2021, albeit “in small incremental steps” as the industry recovers from Hurricane Dorian and COVID-19, Ms Shepherd said an increasing “intake” of young farmers will help awaken the industry from its present “sluggish” condition.

“There’s no other choice,” she told Tribune Business. “We have no choice. We want to be able to feed ourselves and want to be able to export. We have to bite the bullet and we have to do that. COVID-19 has illustrated more reasons than one as to why we need to produce more of our food.

“We don’t have sufficient healthy foods to be able to provide for our populace. Every other country is in self-preservation mode at the moment, every other country is looking to support their own, so we have to do the same thing.”