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Ministry of Agriculture Leads Efforts at Sensitising Producers & Importers to New Trading Environment

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Contact: John Emmanuel

Friday, April 20, 2001 - The need for all parties involved in trade to have a clear understanding of the international environment under which they operate has again been underscored if the region is to craft the appropriate responses essential to manage interaction with the international community.

The latest admonition has come from Director of Economic Affairs of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Randolph Cato. Speaking at a two-day sensitisation workshop on Understanding Today’s Agricultural Markets, Cato told participants drawn from both public and private sector bodies, that a more focused approached to international trade matters was needed on the part of national agricultural officials. 

St. Lucia, he noted, had moved expeditiously in that direction, under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture, in getting the message across to stakeholders involved in agriculture. According to Cato, “It makes no sense for us to reel against the iniquities and inequities of the WTO and other kinds of trading arrangements of which we are a part. We have to understand them and understand how we must use whatever opportunities and windows that are afforded to us and understand how we must move to defend our interest so that we cannot continue simply to be in a complaining mode. We have, instead, got to get ourselves in a proactive mode so that we can see how we can move forward,” Cato said. 

Meanwhile, Agriculture Minister the Honourable Cassius Elias has again called upon farmers and their organizations to continue to reposition themselves in order to take advantage of the changing market place. New ways of doing business, he says, must be developed if the local industry is to survive.

“We have to cut out this … producing when we want to and expect persons to fall over themselves finding markets that we don’t have. Within the context of our tourism industry, we can’t tell the hotel managers that the chickens didn’t lay or that farmers did not wake up on time to drop the supplies at the market.  They want it on their premises when they need it,” Minister Elias said.

The same thing goes for our banana industry, he said. “If we are to stay in the market we have to produce good quality bananas consistently. We have to produce the right tonnage per acre to compete with the rest of the world and we have to be honest and truthful with our farmers.”  

 

St. Lucia’s diversification effort Minister Elias says continues to bear fruit, although he has called for diversification on an even wider scale.

 

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