Transcript of the speech delivered by the Honourable Mia Amor Mottley, Q.C., M.P., Prime Minister of Barbados, at the Launch of the FEED Programme
May 13, 2019
Thank you very much, Eric.
Distinguished guests all.
I am going to be very short this evening, because I believe that you have had a feast of speeches and I don’t want to do anything to distract from Mr. Nichols’ exchange with us. On Wednesday when I passed through Mount Wilton, I had cause on a site visit to visit him and I asked him then if he would be prepared to come and share with us, because some 18 months or two years ago, I had the good fortune of spending about three hours with Mr. Nichols and understood then the passion which he has for agriculture.
The only thing about my speech that is going to be featured this evening is to let you know that I’ve come to give the Minister and all of his officials, the chairman of the BADMC and his board and all of his officials, the absolute assurance that all of the political will that I can muster in my body will be brought to bear to make a success of this and other initiatives in the Ministry of Agriculture.
And I say so because you don’t need a lot of long talk to know that we need to reduce the amount of foreign exchange that this country spends. And as Mr. Nichols said, we cannot afford to have a food import bill of 700 million odd dollars, six hundred eighty five million to be precise, for 2018 of which vegetables and fruit account for just under 10 percent at 66 million dollars roughly that we import every year. It is simply not good enough. And Barbarians can do better if we pull together and work together and use that old encouragement of one-one blow killing old cow. Every pound and every kilogram we can go after in terms of fruit and vegetables.
But that’s not the only part of it. The second part of it is that we need also to change how people eat. And I think we all know that how we eat determines how we feed our bodies. And this is as old as millennia but the truth is, sometimes we need to educate and reeducate. And to that extent, ironically, this weekend, I watched a wonderful documentary called The Magic Pill which showed exactly how persons suffering from either diabetes or autism or other chronic non-communicable diseases were able to use changes in their diet in order to significantly reduce the amount of medication that they were forced to take and to improve their own prognoses in terms of their own medical well-being.
And we have not to share that information simply in the heavy way but the ministry has the luxury of Barbados’ greatest communicator, in my view, Eric, in Bajan, to be able to help us communicate that to ordinary people. There are too many people eating English potato chips on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday night in this country. There are too many people that can eat baked sweet potato instead or can eat Eddos or can eat Eddo chips that when cut and baked, look the same as potato chips and crisp?
There are so many things that we can do, and it hurts my heart to see that we are not making sufficient progress, family by family, individual by individual and this no becomes the need for a partnership between the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Information, but using people who know how to communicate to the average Barbarian household. I maintain that one of the best pieces of literature produced by a Barbadian is a book called Pig Tails and Breadfruit, written by one of our greatest authors who has now deceased, Austin Tom Clark, and who was able in that book not only to communicate how to cook, but to do so in a way that told the story of who we are and how we were raised as a people. So it is trite for me to be able to discuss these things because you all know it and everyone else has said it. What makes the difference now is doing and what makes the difference is scale. When Indar first brought this program to me, I asked him for one thing and one thing alone that the scale to which they were targeting could not bring about any change in behavior in this country. Recognizing that we are in a battle against climate change, recognizing that we are in a battle against trade wars, it is absolutely critical that Barbarians be able to take control of what they eat more and more. And that is why his Ministry is called the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security.
I thank you Minister and the former Minister; this is a case of getting two for the price of one, for both ensuring that the object of the Ministry, the goal of the Ministry with respect to food security can be turned from an objective and indeed a noun, to a verb. Because if we can act, if we can do, then we can feed and not just talk about food. And if we can feed by producing ourselves, then we reduce the foreign exchange, we provide jobs, we produce food that improves our health, and we end up also creating the basis and platform for wealth, as you have heard from Mr. Nichols.
Why is Mr. Nichols this story important? Because we need to start telling our young people that history is not always in a straight line, nor is success, and that there will always be obstacles, whether you are a lawyer or a farmer, whether you are a vendor or a fisherman, that life throws obstacles, that life throws hurdles at us. But it is how we respond to the hurdles and how we respond to the obstacles that makes the defining difference between success and failure.
We are here to help train our people, to help provide access to the financing, whether through direct loans or lease to own, as we will with the container farms. And we are here also to be able to pool the heavy costs, particularly carried by heavy machinery, where individual farmers may not be able to buy their own as we know traditionally, but they can have access to a pooled set of equipment to be able to meet that definable difference. But all of this will only produce results, Woody, if we are capable, as you correctly said, of ensuring that there is a market and a market is both: one about interests and the people who want to buy and eat and; two the capacity to be able to deliver in a timely way, in a manner that is attractive, in a manner that is affordable.
We believe we have the elements to make that change. It is up to the rest of Barbados to join us on this journey. And I ask you, Minister, all that is shared here, let it not be with a few hundred people at Sunbury, but let this know be the mission of a country to take control of its health, to take control of its prosperity, and to take control of its economic well-being at the same time, and in so doing, to make better society a stronger people and giving people options for live.
I thank the Minister and once again the chairman for accepting the challenge of making sure that the people who will be on the frontline of this programme will be those who have already borne the adjustment of what Barbados has had to bear from a last lost decade. And I ask those of us to work with them, because when I said to the country in October last year that we are going to work with you to give you the chance through agriculture or through digitisation or through other opportunities and economic empowerment and entrepreneurship, I meant it. And if I have to work every single day to make sure that we create the platform for those who are carrying the adjustment for a grateful nation, I shall do so.
And I thank the Ministry of Agriculture for allowing me to hold faith and to keep the promise to the people of this country. Thank you. And God bless.