Dominica’s Agriculture Minister, Roland Royer has called on OECS Governments to improve coordination and technical cooperation on agriculture to achieve the region’s goals for food security and increased productivity.
Royer, the Chair of the OECS Council of Ministers: Agriculture, addressed the 7th Meeting of the Council in Grenada on Friday, June 30.
“We believe that through shared knowledge, best practices, research and development, innovation and the facilitation of agricultural trade, finance, and investment we can achieve much as a grouping.
“We must prioritize technical and business activities that strengthen our capacity to increase the productivity and regional trade of agricultural products and the demand for healthy food to reverse the increasing trends of the incidence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs),” the Minister stated.
Agriculture would prosper if it was more than a dog and pony show. The minimal funding that is available is gobbled up by greedy older people marred with trauma from a corrupt government. Most young people cannot afford to buy land or invest. Agriculture is not at the forefront because everyone has 2-3 jobs even government officials with valid degrees. Agriculture is woefully lacking because people lack the knowledge, funding and tools to use modern techniques. When tools are available it is not advertised and people collect them just to let it rot. Look at the skeletons of wasted greenhouses everywhere. You have people who work hard who cannot get the tools they need because of jealousy and general incompetence. The people who are supposed to steer these resources towards the farmers are blinded by their own ego. The few in the departments who have the capacity to intact change are thwarted because of ego. There is no standardization. Just scrambling. No data, no stats. Just failure
I do not know who is Roland Royer..Still don’t know, because he is in the center..No single person is in the center here, because there are SIX individuals!!!
Anyway it’s all talk. Fact is agriculture was placed on the back burner by Skerrit, since selling of our passports to people all around the world (many of nefariour character), was a more lucrative business…From the Dominican standpoint, what i would like is figures/data, showing the DOLLAR ($$$$) contribution of agriculture to the Dominican economy over the past 5 years…Then we would be able to see how dismal this sector is performing, relative to the other islands…This has been a secret for quite some time, but the bla, bla, bla, continues..
This corrupt autocracy doesn’t even give anecdotal data to its citizens. There is no expectation of them producing the empirical evidence on anything to do with the functioning of this oligarchy.
This is not a government in the sunshine. It is a nocturnal enterprise. The corruption and deception will continue unabated as long as the citizenry continues to be nonchalant about the excesses by the powers that be and the nondisclosure of public information.