 Hello again, St. Lucia, and welcome to the program, Agriculture on the Move. I am Philip Sidney, your host. Welcome to those persons, because this year is our first program for the year. And I would like to wish every farmer, every fisher folk, I would like to wish the agro-processors, the market vendors, the consumers, and other stakeholders. Of course, I do not want to leave out our technicians at GIS, at NCN, Roger, Miguel, and of course Miss Leader PIO, and to wish everyone of you a happy, healthy, and productive 2022. With me in studio today is the Minister with Responsibility for Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security, and Rural Development, the Honourable Alfred Prospect. Welcome to the program, sir, and I would like to wish you and your family a productive, healthy 2020, and by extension, I am also wishing you a productive 2020 when it comes to the Ministry of Agriculture and your programs and your policies. Thank you very much Sidney, and it's a pleasure to be sitting here with you. As you mentioned, this is the first program, and I want to take the opportunity to wish every farmer, fisher, livestock farmer, everybody involved in the agricultural sector. More importantly, the staff of the Ministry of Agriculture, my PS, my Deputy PS, my Secretary, my Driver, the Communications Unit in particular, who is now involved in ensuring that we disseminate the information that the public wants to hear about the agricultural sector. I want to wish everybody a productive 2022, and I hope we can see new things emerging from the agricultural sector. Thank you very much, sir, and welcome to be here. First off, the banana industry. Very, very serious. Very serious, eh? I know I won't go back and rehash what happened last year in terms of you leading a task to England, and you know what happened. You told the nation the results. I know you have appointed a task force moving forward to understand where we are because we realize the market is very, you know, it is a small window, you know, and we need to ensure that we can ship our bananas again to the UK. Where are we now, and what's going to happen to the banana industry? Very good. The task force has been appointed by the Cabinet. It's an eight-member task force, and the whole responsibility of the task force is to really look at a strategic action plan for the banana industry. We were given that commitment to the supermarket people in the UK that there is an urgent need to look at where we are in the banana industry, where we really want to go, and how we want to get there. So the task force has begun its work, and they've been meeting, as a matter of fact, as I speak, they are supposed to be meeting the BPIP and some other people right there at the Union Tissue Culture Conference Room to really engage the key stakeholders involved in the banana industry, and to really find and identify the challenges, the issues, the problems, and to see how we can continue to secure the market in the UK. As we all know the market, the UK market is of tremendous importance to us. We've been there many, many, many decades, and what we saw or what we found out after during the visit in the UK is not a rosy picture, and we need to do what we have to to ensure that we continue to secure the market. I have been impression on reaching out to the farmers, and just last night I met the Greece farmers in the Greece community, and I stressed and emphasised the importance of quality and productivity. I'm hoping in the next two weeks, three weeks, the task force will submit a report to the Cabinet that will provide some guidance in terms of where we are, what are some of the challenges, and where we want to go. I know our farmers are under tremendous financial pressure because they have not been, most of them have not been selling bananas since Hurricane Elsa, and that is one of the things that have been coming up, increased price of fertiliser and other farm inputs, and we all know the COVID has impacted on that, raw materials have become more expensive, shipping has become more expensive, and at the end of the day, the farmers have to bear the brunt of this problem in terms of having to pay almost double the price they were paying for a bag of fertiliser in the last few months. It is something that my ministry, the Cabinet, you know we are looking into to see how we can make it much easier for our farmers. More of these farmers, it is a problem that we know it has affected them, and we are looking into what we can do to make them sell a lot of things that they need to figure out, and then we can make them comfortable and buy them, because we know that we are looking at the quality of these farmers, the quality of what they need to sell, the quality of what they need to sell, the quality of what they need to sell, the quality of what they need to sell, the quality of what they need to sell. So it's a very important and significant aspect of the Manana industry, and I'm hoping that the task force report will bring some level of confidence in the market in terms of demonstrating to the UK people that we are ready and we are dealing with the issues and challenges that they have been concerned about in regards to our quality of our bananas over the last few months. So after that report is done, what timeline the task force has to deliver that report, and then from that report, what's next? Well I would really like to first see that what is really important for us is to get a report to the supermarket people up in the UK to indicate that we have made the commitment in terms of doing something. We made that promise and Fives in particular said to us that unless we see some level of attention being given to addressing the issues in the banana industry, they will not engage us. So we give them a timeline of end of January, early February, that we hope we can say to them this is what we've done since our last meeting in the UK. This is the report, let's continue our discussion to ensure that we remain, but it's a serious matter because it is one thing to have something in a report to see this is what we're going to do, but to do it, it must be implemented, it must be implemented on the ground, and the farmers have a very important role to make sure that we have the support from the ministry, we have the support from government. Okay, so what's going to happen moving on with for example the BPIP and the continuation of assisting with the agronomy and of course increasing production? One of a serious concern for me with the BPIP is when I got into this ministry, I was told that the BPIP life is coming to an end at the end of March this year because the contract or the support given by the Taiwanese was for a five-year period, but here is it, we are focusing on quality to ensure that we secure the UK market, but we have an entity which is the BPIP that was very focused on quality production, health, nutrition, etc., is now coming to an end, so we now have to consider leaf spot, that's a continuing problem, a continuing concern, and we must ensure that we continue to focus on dealing with the problem, so we are now contemplating setting up a very small unit to continue with technical people who have been involved in the the Black Sikotawa control and so on, so we can get the oil and the materials that we need to ensure that we continue focusing on quality. Well done, okay, now it remains of me not mentioning in talking bananas, St. Lucia is going bananas based on a statement our Prime Minister made, and I mean that statement for me was the best statement he made, there's nothing wrong with the statement, you know, I mean we have been pushing our consumption of bananas in St. Lucia, not now, in fact we have in the making, we're just hoping to get it printed, since 2019, you know a banana recipe book, we have about 56 recipes in that already, and all we need to get is get it funded and get it distributed, so I don't understand what was the problem with and all the who are you know on social media, what do you think on that? Well I must see and I want to commend the Prime Minister for making this statement, because I see it as a very very good marketing strategy, for our bananas, a marketing strategy, and it's coming from the head of the state, the Prime Minister of St. Lucia, and I want to say PM, thank you for his statement, because it has really promoted bananas island wide, worldwide, to be exact, and I want to make this point that some people seem to forget the social and economic impact that the banana industry has had on St. Lucia, that's right, my education came from it, my parents used to be involved in it and that is how they used to take care of the kids, the family, you know you have farmers who have been there from age 17 growing bananas and they are still into banana production, so I really found it really strange after a statement like that, that some people took it so negatively, I mean you saw this photo with the PM dressed in a banana leaf and then I was standing next to him on all the cabinet or most of the cabinet members were there, I love it and whoever felt that it was going to create a problem, I love it because it's helping me as the Minister for our culture to promote bananas, but just take a look at it, we've known bananas to be exported to the UK very often, the days of the 60s and 70s, but what are we doing in terms of local consumption of what we grow and there has always been this term, by local, by local, if every single St. Lucia, you have a population of approximately 175,000 people, just imagine if every person, sorry, consumes one banana a day, that is 175,000, just imagine if those same persons could consume two, you know the amount of consumption of our own bananas that would be happening in St. Lucia? Yeah, what about value added and so on, so many other things can, we are exporting bananas to places like Barbados, but we get Barbados taking our bananas and producing various products. Banana flour, all banana, yes, back to us, exactly, to purchase, exactly. So I want persons to take the statement that the PM made and think of how we can use bananas, our own bananas that we have in St. Lucia and to produce other products from it, banana flour, banana, so many things that can happen, definitely, let's utilize our bananas because we know what is happening in the market, we can see that the market potential is not the same as, let's think of innovative ways to utilize our own bananas. So they thought it was negative, but then it became positive, in fact, right now, it's green gold, you know? It's green gold, yes. After, people were going to the supermarkets and they couldn't get bananas and they were boiling over the police, people were selling bananas at a very high price at that time, so what's the problem? In fact, we are going to be having a banana festival, yes, pretty soon. I'm going to bring in all stakeholders, I'm going to bring in the chefs, I'm going to bring in the schools to participate and of course by then the recipe book will be printed for distribution. We're going bananas, look out for it, but we must ensure that we get our populace to understand our health. I mean, there's so many health benefits, so many bananas. So before we get to break, I just want to go to another program that is very close to you, which is the Seven Crops Program. The second phase of the program, we launched it sometime the first week of January and it was a follow-up to the first phase which I was told contributed to a reduction in the food import bill, correct? I believe I'm strongly convinced that we are importing too much of what we can produce and or grow in St. Lucia and we need to ensure that we continue to focus on the Seven Crops Program. This phase, it will not just be Seven Crops, there'll be other crops that will be added, but it's all in an effort to really engage the farmers and to ensure that we can continue to produce what we eat in St. Lucia as much as possible. We will be engaging the farmers like we did in the first phase, but I also encourage more farmers to participate because there are some sorry incentives that are available for those farmers in terms of irrigation supplies, farm inputs that are sold to farmers at a subsidized price, but we know the fertilizer, we know those inputs are expensive, but we are giving support on the program for that, but it's really for us to sorry look towards reducing the food import bill and to be self-sufficient in what we grow and grow. In fact, if I may go back to the first phase, we did achieve at least five of those crops we reduced on the importation and that to me is big volume. But I wanted to continue declining as much as possible. Because the other phase is for five years, right? Yes, five years. So definitely we have not to do. But one of the things I want this phase to include is a mechanization component. Yeah, because you're going for a break. You're watching agriculture on the move. Stay tuned, don't go away. Banana farmers remember me? I destroyed the Grumichel banana variety some years ago. Now my cousin, Tropical Race 4 or TR4, a fusarium-willed banana disease is on the horizon in a more aggressive form and can wipe out the banana industry in a flash. Be vigilant. Don't bring any banana plants or plant tissue into the island. Report any unusual symptoms on your banana plots to the Department of Agriculture at telephone 468-5600 or the extension officer in your area. Remember, protect our vital banana industry. Welcome back to the program, agriculture on the move. Of course with me, if you just joined in is our Honorable Alfred Prospe, who is the Minister of Responsibility for Agriculture. Of course, Mr. Prospe, we were talking about the success of the seven crops program in its first phase and we're moving into a second phase for the next five years. And one of the components that we really, it's really important for the success of that program is mechanization. Farmers are talking about this. It is still, we have some equipment, but it is still not there yet because farmers are still complaining not getting that service on time. So where are we moving forward? The important thing about farming is to reduce your cost of production and just imagine a farmer has to plough half a neck of land using a hand fork. That's right. He will spend a lot more time and money doing that as against if he has a small rototiller. We've seen farmers planting and digging hundreds of holes for bananas, planting and so on, but there are various forms of equipment that can do that mechanically. And so I want the seven crops to embrace that component and use it as a means of demonstrating to the farming sector that there are various equipment available that can be used to make it easier for you and to reduce your cost of production. I'm also concerned that doing that will also make agriculture more sexy for our young people to get in because our young people will not come in and take a napsack sprayer, pump it and pump it throughout the day. When you can get a napsack sprayer that is batch operated, all the person has to do is to hold the handle and spray. Rototillers, that should be a replacement for the hand fork and I'm not in any way saying that I have a problem with the cutlass and the fork. They can be used when necessary and so on, but they can be used. But I'm saying if we really want to take agriculture seriously and we want to reduce our cost of production, we must go in this direction. So I'm hoping that this phase of the seven crops program will demonstrate a lot of those new forms of mechanization, new technology in the sector that will really make farmers a lot better in terms of profit making and really to encourage younger persons to get into the sector. As we on the seven crop program, one of the main areas of concern, like you even heard at some of the meetings we attended with farmers, was the sale of their produce. And of course the non-marketing board has been restructured and we're hoping that they will definitely take the lead in that regard. And I know they have been giving farmers contracts and stuff like this. What's your take on with farmers still having that problem? Well, I'm very concerned about the status of a marketing, St. Lucia Marketing Board, as I always believe that that entity is really supposed to be buying, if not all. It should be all. Most of what our farmers produce. But there are other institutions like Massey, who probably is competing with the marketing board. The marketing board does not have the financial resources to buy and to be able to pay all the farmers on time. Because it's one thing to ask your farmers to produce. Your farmers produce and they are ready to have it by a certain time. But the farmers needs to know that they are going to be paid for their produce at a certain time. So they can continue their production. Now it is one thing to see we sell into marketing board or we sell into the hotels. But we have to wait two months to get paid. And as I mentioned hotels, I'm very concerned about the length of time the hotels take to pay the farmers. Just imagine you're waiting two months, three months to get paid. Imagine if you have to go into continuous production, you will be stranded because you may not have the financial resources to go into other crops and to continue to make money. So I'm saying all of this to see, I want to see the marketing board be more sustainable in terms of buying from the farmers. Making sure that the farmers continue to place and trust the marketing board as an entity that they can call and see. I have 200 pounds of watermelons. But not to be told by the marketing board. I can only take 150 pounds. Now the marketing board has to look at its whole operations now and maybe think of storage. Most important. Storage is important. Sometimes we see gluts in cucumbers, we see gluts in watermelons. But if you have a storage facility that we can store, buy and store for a period of two, three weeks, then that problem can be solved. But I believe the marketing board, I am confident there is a new board in place. I'm very confident I can see from what I've been hearing. They are very focused. And I believe that soon from now we'll see more confidence by the farmers in terms of delivery of service by the marketing board in terms of meeting the needs and challenges. I cannot forget, of course, our agro processors. Because Mr. Minister, let me tell you, there are COVID, yes, and again, negatives. But a lot of positives came from COVID. People decided, let them be innovative. There are so many young people out there that I am noticing that are involved in agro processing. So what's your ministry doing in terms of taking agro processing to the next level? I think that is one of the most critical needs of the ministry in terms of reviewing this whole agro processing sector by itself. Because we are producing a lot and there are markets available, not just locally, but outside of St. Lucia for those products. But I believe we need to really find ways to engage those persons and to really give them the support that they need to increase production in terms of whatever they do. I have seen persons, I know of persons who are producing tea bags from cinemas and so many south sub-leaves and so on. So many of those persons who are involved in it. But for me, I notice some of them are hidden. You don't really see them in the forefront. You just hear it on the side that I bought this from this person. But how we can come in and give this people support so we can see them in the forefront and not somebody doing something in the backyard. And it's only on a Friday or Saturday, you see them by the market selling. We need to promote those products, let people know where they are, how to find them. And I believe it will go well for us as a ministry. But definitely the agro processing sector is very, very critical. And I believe it is a direction that our ministry, our government needs to take to really push that sector. And I'm using my program as a vehicle to really expose a lot of those hidden persons. Trust me, this year you see a lot of that. Yeah, we need to showcase them and let people know what they are doing. The livestock industry. I know we are looking at again our mid-processing facility, the MPF in VA4. I heard you said it's going to stay there. I'm also hearing about volet is developing well. I don't know how soon we'll get to volet. What tell us about where we are? Well, first I will start with the mid-processing facility. That facility was funded by the Taiwanese government, costing millions of dollars. And the DSH, when it came in, the plan was to break it down. I mean, this is a sad, sad state of affairs to know that a country is given a donation by the Taiwanese government to take care of our livestock problems. But yet, it was emacked to be disintegrated. But I have been informed that this is going to be a reverse situation, that it will not be broken down. I'm hoping that it will remain as is to help meet the needs of our livestock farmers in St. Lucia. Beautiful. We are still importing high quantities of pork. And I think we can be self-sufficient in pork once that mid-processing facility remains. From what I was told by the PS, there is not much that needs to be done to get it operational. But we need to have the quantity of livestock on the ground to ensure that it is sustainable. You don't want to open the mid-processing facility and you only have stock for one day or twice a week. It has to be sustainable. And we have to now think of getting our products outside to the various OECS countries, the Caribbean. So I'm very concerned about it. I'm hoping that it will remain and we can make it operational to meet the livestock needs, the meat, poultry, pork, and other meats that we import. So we can reduce the import of those commodities. Okay. Volet, both issues to volet. Sadly, I mean, honestly, my sentiments have always been the both issues. Maybe as a student, you know, going around the island, you know, you go to both issues, you'll see all the animals. But as it may, we have a new site and I know it's developing quite nicely. It's developing quite nicely. But I'm hoping that by now we would have moved the animals across so that we can begin full operation. But I know as we speak, the office building is under construction. There were some road works that I was told are near completion. And so as soon as possible, we will be moving the stock that we currently have at SAFA to volet and we can begin operation there. My hope is that it will attract the young people to come in and purchase the piglets and so on. So we can really boost the livestock sector in St. Lucia and we can get more persons to benefit directly from the both issues in terms of the work that the ministry intends to undertake at both issues. Okay. As we're about to end our first, because that program is the two part program. So that's part one. So we're about to end part one. Do you have any final words? Yes, I want to say we need to really look at this ministry. The changes that have taken place in terms of COVID, we were not aware COVID would ever be there. And we know what COVID has done in terms of food security. I think there is an urgent need for us to look at the ministry and reposition the ministry to be able to deal with the challenges of, for example, COVID climate change. Climate change will always impact us as a sector. And so we must ensure that we reposition the ministry to really take on those challenges and to be able to ensure that we engage our farmers and other stakeholders, the fishers, the livestock farmers, the seamos farmers, and really work with them in terms of dealing with the challenges of climate change and COVID. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me there. And I must say, I hope that the St. Lucian populace, especially the farmers and other stakeholders in the sector would have benefited quite a lot from our discussion. Definitely, I hope so. Thank you for being here. And of course, we are going to end here for the first part of the program because there's so many things we have to discuss, the what they call the official sector. So thank you for being here. You've been watching Agriculture on the Move. I would like to say thank you for viewing the program. Mr. Prime Minister, even if they say you go in bananas, that's not a problem, because we have to go bananas, we have to eat bananas, and we have to grow bananas. We are coming, as I said to you early, we are going to be having a banana festival, and you'll see all the derivatives from bananas. And trust me, after that show, you will go bananas and you'll eat more bananas. Thank you for viewing. I want to thank, of course, my technical team from the Minnesota agriculture, Zariq and also Mr. Odlam for giving me the support that they gave me for the past year. And I'm hoping to have them again to give more support to ensure that we have a good program. Thank you for viewing again. I'm Philip Sidney saying goodbye and see you again.