BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) — A senior Barbados government official says Caribbean countries do not need technology to build bombs and rockets in order to attain the status of developed economy.

But Esworth Reid, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Food, Fisheries and Water Resource Management here in Barbados, said the agricultural sector is crucial to the Caribbean attaining developed world status.

“Any country from among us, that would have taken the leap to adopt appropriate Government policies and to seek out, through regional cooperation, appropriate technologies to combine and use the natural and primary resources it has efficiently and effectively and to produce critical products that would serve to make that country self-sufficient or close to being self-sufficient,” Reid told participants attending the one-week Caribbean-Pacific Agri-Food forum that ends here on Friday.

The forum, which is being held under the theme “Link – Learn – Transform” is organised by the Technical Centre For Agriculture and Rural Cooperation ECP-EU (CTA), the Barbados Agricultural Society, the Intra-ACP Agricultural Policy Programme and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).

It aims to promote synergies between the Caribbean and Pacific to spur agri-food development and seeks to harness cross-learning between policy-makers, private sector players and farmers’ representatives as a way of harnessing innovative solutions that can benefit the agri-food sector in both regions.

Reid said the only constraint to using agriculture to attain developed nation status “is that whatsoever that country is doing must be sustainable and you must keep out of internal and external conflicts.

“I will go further and say that no developing country can effectively attain a sustainable growth path or developed-economy status unless it has a vibrant and sustainable agricultural sector.

“Just take note of most developed countries. They have some of the most vibrant and developed agricultural sectors and more so, most of them are practically self-sufficient in basic food, both at the level of the primary product and at the top of the value-added chain in manufacturing,” he said.

He said that in Barbados, the government has recognised the critical importance of the agricultural sector to economic growth and has been pursuing a number of programmes, projects and ways to stimulate and grow the sector and to make it sustainable.

“This is despite the numerous and severe challenges that the sector had to face over the past thirty or so years, which resulted in the relative contribution it made to GDP (Gross Domestic Product) contracting from as high as thirty per cent in the late 1970s and early 1970s, to under three per cent today.”

He said the challenges to using agriculture to achieve developed country status “were many and severe and we are still faced with such challenges”.

Reid said this is why Barbados has designed and submitted to the Cabinet of ministers, a well-structured national policy on agriculture to carry the sector forward.

He spoke of the challenges that member countries of the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) grouping and former colonies of Europe face with respect to the removal of the preferential treatment they once had in the European markets.

“Beside this challenge — and I can only speak specifically of Barbados — we are faced with the severe challenge of praedial larceny, which in some ways has been putting undue stress on many genuine farmers and forcing some of them out of business.