The Bahamas’ agricultural sector will be well-placed to compete globally once the country changes the way it currently conducts its agricultural business, Financial Services Minister Ryan Pinder revealed to the Journal Tuesday.
Mr. Pinder, who has made the country’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) a top priority, said educating the industry about global regulations and the benefits that exist from being a member of the WTO are paramount to this transformation.
“People are fearful that we are not competitive in agriculture because of how we conduct our agricultural business,” he said. “We still operate in a fashion where [in] the packinghouse system you get a certain percentage of loss to rotten decay and then it comes here. You have to have a new philosophy and policy with agriculture.”
The financial services minister pointed out that The Bahamas has shown its ability to compete globally in the fisheries sector noting that the country remains the largest harvester of crawfish in the region; this, he added, has happened because harvesting crawfish is done in the proper way in The Bahamas.
Mr. Pinder said that creating a Standards Bureau as a means of establishing and maintaining proper quality standards will be pivotal in propelling The Bahamas in to the WTO.
“We speak about in our Charter for Governance full circle economies and what we would like to do is marry agriculture with industry,” Mr. Pinder said. “So then now you can go to Eleuthera and Eleuthera is producing pineapples again and those pineapples are diced and they’re sliced and they’re dried and they’re juiced and they’re canned then boxed and packaged and exported straight from Eleuthera.
“You don’t have any waste you have everybody buying the product because you have that processing facility on the island it’s a full circle economy building the complete comprehensive economy of Eleuthera but also developing a high end export-based agricultural product. It can be done… it just has to be done differently from the way we are doing it today.”
