(Excerpts of Dr Godwin Friday’s Presentation at a Public Meeting in Diamonds, South Central Windward)
This is a farming community. You know how to produce from the land, how to make something out of nothing, how to bring prosperity to your home and to your community and to the country. You know how to do it. And with a little assistance and guidance from government, which has an important role to play, you can deliver that again. But it’s not happening now.
You heard earlier about the fact that they built a greenhouse park at Montreal. That money that was given to this country by the European Union. We got over $30 million. They spent some of this and built a greenhouse park at Montreal. I went there several times and I tell you, it brings tears to your eyes because here you have a project that has the potential to point the way, the future for agriculture in this country, and they have simply abandoned it. What you’re seeing there is grass; elephant grass growing under the canopy of the greenhouses. In the yard, you have them storing BRC wire, gravel and stone for some project going on and not using it for the thing that it was intended to do. And you know that the farmers could do so much with it.
They built it and when they built it, they figured with everything else, once they built it, their job is done. It is something that you could look at, a big shiny object. You can say to the people, look what I did for you. And the point that we always make is this. Ask the people in Richmond Park, in Montreal, in Mespo, in Marriaqua, in the country, any farmer, ask them how that has affected their lives for the better. And none of them could tell you that it helped them.
Some time ago, I talked to a farmer. He said, Friday, this thing has so much potential. We can use it for growing seedlings, to supply to the whole community. We can create a cooperative and get the farmers to grow vegetables to supply to the hotels. It doesn’t take a genius to do it. All it takes is somebody who has his head in the right place and they have the heart to do it. They have to think about the people whom they’re serving. Not just finding ways in which you can bamboozle people.
It’s the same thing that they did in North Windward, in Owia, where they built a fisheries complex cost over $30 million. You go up there now and see it. Not one single person gets employment out of that. The place is closed up. All the doors are locked up. The equipment there is rusting. The place is falling apart just like the rest of the country. Because again, all they want to do, they built it. It looks good and pretty. They take a picture and they put it on the cover of the Estimates or some other document. And they say, look, my job is done. And the people continue to suffer.
But what these people do, they say people are poor. They are desperate. So, what they do is, they build something big and mighty and pretty. And they show them and say, look here is the promised land, but you will never enter into it because that was never the intention. We have to go beyond that. And we can do it. We have in Israel Bruce, a person who comes out of this constituency. He knows it intimately. He knows what is confronting the farmers.. that they can’t make a living, because when they plant somebody else is reaping. When they raise their animals, somebody else is catching them and killing them.
I met a man in Kingstown. He said, “Friday, promise me this. When you get in office, because you will get there, we have to build an abattoir in this country. Do you know that under the same project that they built the greenhouses up at Montreal, it’s called the Banana Accompanying Measures Initiative (BAM), that there was a plan there to also build an abattoir. So that you could have a slaughterhouse that you could have good cuts of meat, you could take your animals there and get it done. This man, his great accomplishment is that he isn’t killing the animals here, he is shipping them alive to Grenada where they have an abattoir. And then they will sell the meat for ten times what they sell the live animals for, and we probably buying it back. Where is the vision?
We talk here about the challenges that farmers have in this country, the marketing. This government got rid of the Marketing Board, and they didn’t put anything in place to replace it. I was talking to somebody earlier. He said nobody tells them what the price is until the trafficker comes to them and say, well, listen, this is how much I am paying you for a sack of dasheen. This is how much I will pay you for plantain. And whether you can make money on it or not, that is what it is.
But you can’t have that and have a thriving agricultural industry because farmers are rational people like anybody else. If you plant something that costs you $50, you can’t sell it for $40 because it means you haven’t made anything to put it back in the ground. I am talking here to the people who know it. I’m preaching to the converted you understand that. So, here’s what we have to do. You can’t accept that this is our lot. You can’t accept that this is how things are going to be forever.
