Antigua and Barbuda Agriculture Minister Hilson Baptiste Tuesday urged Caribbean nationals to grow food required to feed themselves, while warning that there are health consequences to imports.

"We are seeing 10-year-old boys with breasts. The same is true with young girls," Baptiste said Tuesday at a Caribbean Week of Agriculture forum.

"This is all because we are not producing enough of our own and have to spend so much money importing food that we can grow ourselves," he told delegates.

The Caribbean is faced with an import food bill of US$4 billion annually. The need to cut the food-import bill was a recurring theme at the forum that involved farmers, financial agencies, agricultural experts, youth and women's organisations.

Baptiste said he was concerned about the quality of food imported into the region and called for the revocation of colonial and Atlantic slave era laws banning farmers from putting up permanent structures on land.

He said the regional governments should now concentrate on replacing such archaic laws with those that allow for land ownership or 25-year leases for farmers to help them obtain crucial credit.

Ironic situation

Baptiste said that the Caribbean, with probably the best weather for agriculture in the world, is, ironically, a net importer of food because it lacks the administrative and institutional capacity, political will included, to correct the situation.

He also said regional ministerial committees were working to reduce praedial larceny, now running as high as 25 per cent.

Tourism agro specialist at the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA), Ena Harvey, told the meeting it was also important for the region to provide the institutional and political support for the farming sector, pointing to the irony of a region that spends billions importing food "to feed the very tourists who come".

She called for the establishment of an agro-tourism resource centre to give support to the stakeholders, making reference to various local food outlets like hotels, villas and cruise ships.

"Tourists are an extension of the local population," she said, noting that many come to sample regional cuisine.

Chief coordinator of the Caribbean Farmers Network, Jethro Greene, said the time has come for the farming community to place itself "at the centre" of the debate regarding the direction of Caribbean life rather than leave it to politicians "who had put us on the back burner" for decades.

"Why entrust the same people who put us on the back burner before? That is why we are putting ourselves at the centre now," he said, telling the meeting that his organisation represents 500,000 farmers in 13 member states.

Several of the women farmers who participated in the two-day forum complained about difficulty accessing credit because they were deemed to be "high-risk clients".

They expressed disappointment about the absence of commercial banks and other lending institutions, saying having all stakeholders in one place would have been ideal.

Melvin Edwards, of the Caribbean Confederation of Credit Unions, said people still hold commercial banks in high regard despite the recent global banking crisis and despite a reluctance by banks to lend to farmers - leaving it to credit unions and other intermediate institutions which do not demand collateral in the same way the banks do.

"We have learnt that bigger is not necessarily better," he said.

- CMC