Clarence Town, Long Island – Agriculture and Fisheries Minister V Alfred Gray wants farmers in this once breadbasket island to cultivate up to 60 more acres of corn for the growing local appetite for native grits and corn meal flour.
“There is a huge market for it throughout The Bahamas,” Long Island Packing House supervisor Maurice Minnis confirmed.
The government packing house here sells all the native grits, and the nutritious corn meal used for cereals, that are processed in Long Island.
Minister Gray and Deputy Director, Department of Cooperative Development Judy L Simmons, toured this farming and fishing region last weekend. They met with farmers, fishermen and co-operative personnel as he sought to promote the government’s self sufficiency policy.
Purchased at the government’s packing house for 50 cents a pound, the corn is ground into grits which is sold for $1 per pound and then corn meal, sold for 50 cents per pound.
The only mill that can separate the grits and flour in the grinding process is at the packing house in Clarence Town.
It processes up to three hundred pounds of corn each week. What is not sold in Long Island is shipped to the government’s Produce Exchange at Potter’s Cay, New Providence.
“From what I can see, I believe that there is great potential in Long Island,” said Mr Gray. “The packing house is doing a good job in putting together the products which are brought to it by the farmers here.
“I would like to encourage farmers, having seen what they sell here, to diversify their crops. Bananas seem to be the main crop presently in the packing house. I encourage farmers to go into something else so that every farmer does not farm for bananas.
“In that way the packing house would have a greater variety of products to ship to Nassau and elsewhere in the Bahamas.”
Minister Gray then threw out the challenge for “somebody in Long Island to farm 50 or sixty acres of corn. If you have corn you will get grits, and if you get fish, which the Bahamas has an abundance of, fish and grits is a meal.
“This is the first island that I have been to, where I see the quantity of grits that make me feel that we can produce sufficient grits to feed this country.”
But, Long Island, once a leading farm and livestock producing region of the Bahamas, is facing a dilemma.
Young Long Islanders are not following their parents into that labor intensive trade when the sea provides them with a much more profitable attraction.
“Young Long Islanders are far more interested in fishing which is far more lucrative than farming,” said Minnis, also the government’s fisheries inspector.
“The major players in farming have already died out or they are too old to farm,” he said. “The average age of farmers here is increasing every year.”
He anticipated a programme to encourage fishermen to farm during the off-season as was the norm for Long Islanders before.
“They can earn a decent living from farming especially in livestock and bananas, pigeon peas and corn,” said Minnis, “but you have to mass produce. You can’t expect to make $500 off a half acre of corn or peas.”
Long Island’s main crops include bananas, citrus particularly Key and Persian limes, papaya, hot peppers and a thriving cascarilla bark. Their marine harvests include crawfish, groupers and snappers.
There establishment of no-take zones in northeastern and southeastern Long Island has grouper fishermen concerned. The area includes traditional fishing grounds for Long Islanders.
Minister Gray said the no-take zones were necessary to protect the dwindling grouper population.
“Information reaching me is that the Bahamas is the only place left in the western hemisphere where there is still a reasonable abundance of the Nassau grouper,” he explained. “If we allow it to be depleted by not having a closed season, we would soon be like the rest of the world having no grouper to sell or to eat.
“We have an obligation not only to those who fish but to those future Bahamians yet unborn to protect the industry. I would rather close the season for three months and protect it for life than to open it year-round and in five years we have nothing.
“We will have to educate our fishermen into understanding the reason for the closed season and hopefully they will find other means of livelihood during the closed season.
“We, as the government, will do all we can to diversify the means by which fishermen make a living so long as they are willing to work.”
During the town meeting held in the town of Salt Pond, Minister Gray encouraged farmers to “get serious about feeding our country. You have a government that will assist you every step of the way.
“If you get together and get into business, we will help you set up and manage the business so that some monies could come back to Long Island and into your pockets where it rightly belongs.”
Reiterating his commitment “making sure that this country can feed itself,” Mr Gray offered farmers protection from imports.
“What we can produce in the Bahamas in sufficient quantity and at a reasonable price, I will not allow any foreigners to bring those things in to compete with you,” he said. “My job is to protect the Bahamians first. That is my general policy.
“The difficulty we have is when you have sporadic shipments and you do not know how to plan for every shipment. If the Ministry knows that we will have 8,000 bushels of bananas from June to
September, that’s the kind of information I would need in order to fashion the policy so that we do not import bananas during that period.
“I want farmers who are willing to farm year-round so that they can provide us with the qualitative information we need to make the decision to protect them.”
He reached out to young Long Islanders “to understand that this government is very serious about feeding this country, and who else would do it if not our young people. The older people would be able to be resource persons to show them how to farm and what to farm, but the young people must become a part of this process so that the country will not have a dying farming population.
“We do not produce enough food to feed this country and we cannot allow (foreign producers) to feed us,” said Minister Gray.
