By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

The Ministry of Agriculture is aiming to boost vegetable production through the use of hydroponic technology in a bid to reverse double-digit import increases, its top economist said yesterday.

Brickell Pinder, addressing the Rethinking Food Security webinar, said: “When we talk about food security we mentioned the first dimension is food availability, and when we look at the availability of food we are looking at not only the physical availability of food but also the capacity of people, or their economic access to food.

“Prior to COVID-19, here at the Ministry of Agriculture we were actually looking through our import data over the period 2014 to 2018 to try and determine whether there were any trends or any changes with what Bahamians were consuming with respect to food, because we have an idea of what was going on in the domestic sector. A part of food security is ensuring there is sufficient, nutritious, safe food.

She said the analysis showed the importation of vegetables into The Bahamas was growing at 14 percent. Sheep and mutton consumption grew at 13 percent, while egg imports rose by 12 percent. The study also revealed that lettuce was the main imported vegetable during that period, followed by tomatoes, onions, sweet pepper and broccoli.

Ms Pinder added that after the Ministry of Agriculture looked at production systems, it was determined that Bahamian farmers can do some of the items on the list “quite well”. However, in terms of lettuce and broccoli, in particular, there would have to be changes before farmers can produce locally.

Taking into account the Ministry of Health’s food and nutrition policy, Ms Pinder said the Ministry of Agriculture is now looking at how The Bahamas can build food security from a local and community level as opposed to doing it from the “global/national level.”

She added that the ministry “came up with a strategy to look at increasing the food groups, such as the starchy vegetables like the sweet potato, and supporting layer production and bringing food security more closer to households and communities.”

Hailing the increasing affordability of hydroponic cultivation, Ms Pinder said it can make vegetable production more easy and affordable in The Bahamas. “In islands like Andros and Abaco, to a certain extent, we do not have a land issue, but in many, many other islands there are issues in terms of access to land,” she added.

“So we have to look at systems that could be used in a much smaller land space that are not as extensive as what we were once using. COVID-19 has now presented us with an opportunity to roll-out this issue of agriculture - not in the way that we knew it before for vegetable production, but using technologies that have now come down in price so that they are much more accessible to the average person.”