By Damion Mitchell, Staff Reporter
Erskine Griffiths, Minister of Agriculture for Barbados.
- IAN ALLEN/Staff Photographer
DENBIGH, Clarendon:
THE AGRICULTURAL sector will have to change if it is to survive, Erskine Griffiths, Minister of Agriculture for Barbados, said yesterday at the 52nd Denbigh Agri-Industrial Show, near May Pen, central Clarendon.
According to Mr. Griffiths, although Caribbean countries had benefited from stable prices under preferential arrangements with more developed countries, those arrangements do not encourage optimal development of regional products.
"Such arrangements did not facilitate the development of value-added products, or the use of newer technologies and methods, but shielded the agricultural sectors from regional and international competition," he said.
TECHNOLOGICAL PRACTICES
According to Mr. Griffiths, the region must now deal with the rapid pace of globalisation, embracing more technological practices.
"The agriculture sector will continue to face increasing competition from traditional as well as non-traditional sources and many of the region's sectors will be unable to function or even survive if they continue their current modus operandi," he said.
He said the Uruguay Round of the World Trade Organisation negotiations for an agreement on agriculture and the multilateral negotiations currently taking place under the Doha Develop-ment Agenda to bring about equitable forms of agricultural improvement so that developing countries would be able to address the issues of poverty, food security and rural development, have not attained their objectives, and the prospects for achieving a favourable outcome "do not look very promising".
Nevertheless, he said, the region must remain actively involved in the various negotiations to make agriculture viable. He said that if tariffs on sugar and other products were removed from regional producers, without any form of special and differential treatment, as proposed by some developing countries, there would be greater pressures from imports.
