The Gov­ern­ment has con­tract­ed FedEx to ship per­ish­able goods for ex­port as it seeks to help farm­ers find ready mar­kets, says the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Na­tion­al Agri­cul­tur­al Mar­ket­ing and De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion Nir­mala De­bysingh.

Speak­ing at a vir­tu­al agri­cul­ture sem­i­nar host­ed by the Crop­per Foun­da­tion, De­bysingh said the Gov­ern­ment was al­so mov­ing to com­plete the Good Agri­cul­tur­al Prac­tices (GAP) cer­ti­fi­ca­tion which need­ed one more Cab­i­net ap­proval be­fore it could be rolled out.

“We have val­ue chain op­por­tu­ni­ties. Hot pep­per is a pri­ma­ry ex­port prod­uct and we are not on­ly look­ing at op­por­tu­ni­ties at the farm­ing lev­el but al­so by ex­port car­ri­ers so we have en­gaged FedEx to start ship­ping per­ish­able goods for us. We op­er­ate nine farm­ers mar­ket on a week­end and we are ser­viced by 600 farm­ers,” she added. 

De­bysingh al­so re­vealed that the GAP mod­el farm will al­so teach peo­ple the ba­sics of farm­ing.

“The farm will be based on mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy, in­creas­ing out­put and en­cour­ag­ing food safe­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. We want to al­so pro­tect and con­serve the en­vi­ron­ment,” De­bysingh said.

She ex­plained that new agri­cul­tur­al tech­niques will be rolled out at the farm.

 “Our mod­el farm will be based on dif­fer­ent agro­nom­ic sys­tems whether it is s green­house, open fields. All the dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies that are avail­able and util­is­ing them in the cul­ti­va­tion of ma­jor crops,” De­bysingh said.

She said farm­ers will al­so be taught in­te­grat­ed pest man­age­ment. 

“The farm is three acres in size and will in­clude foods that are adapt­able to cli­mate change. We are see­ing more pests and dis­eases. the mod­el farm will ad­dress a lot of these is­sues,” De­bysingh said.

She said there will be a to­tal qual­i­ty man­age­ment ap­proach re­gard­ing the growth of food. 

“We have 3,000 farm­ers on our farm cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gramme. We have been work­ing with them since 1999,” she added.

While the pub­lic was geared to­wards or­gan­ic foods, De­bysingh said wa­ter qual­i­ty was im­por­tant as it re­lates to farm­ing. She said farm­ers will be tak­en on the mod­el farm and shown step by step what should be done to main­tain GAP cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. 

Mean­while, co-founder of Al­liance of Rur­al Com­mu­ni­ties (ARC) Gillian God­dard said her net­work stretch­es across the Caribbean and North Amer­i­ca.

As a choco­late man­u­fac­tur­er, God­dard said her or­gan­i­sa­tion has been fo­cus­ing on vir­tu­al tourism. She al­so thanked Namde­v­co for pro­vid­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties.

“Namde­v­co has helped us to get co­coa pods to co­coa fes­ti­vals. We all need to work in col­lab­o­ra­tion,” God­dard said.

Ken Door­son, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Green borne NV and the IDB Lab-fund­ed Green Wings Pre­ci­sion Farm­ing Project based in Suri­name, said farm­ers have en­gaged in a project us­ing an elec­tro­sta­t­ic spray­ing sys­tem on air­craft that will re­duce the amount of liq­uid sprayed on fields by 60 per cent.

“In Suri­name, we use a lot of pes­ti­cides and we start­ed to look at how to re­duce that use. We show small skills farm­ers to use this tech­nol­o­gy. The IDB to set up pre­ci­sion farm­ing to look at how we can find dif­fer­ent meth­ods of fer­til­i­sa­tion pro­gramme. Fun­da­men­tal­ly when I speak about sys­tems right here we have a pre­ci­sion farm­ing project to de­crease the amount of pes­ti­cides that are be­ing used on rice fields.” 

Dr Chaney St Mar­tin, In­ter­na­tion­al Spe­cial­ist in Wa­ter and Soil Man­age­ment and Cli­mate In­no­va­tion at The In­ter-Amer­i­can In­sti­tute for Co­op­er­a­tion on Agri­cul­ture (IICA) said sus­tain­abil­i­ty was com­plex.

He said sus­tain­abil­i­ty meant the con­tin­u­a­tion of the ecosys­tem and good prac­tices among farm­ers were im­por­tant. (RD)

Say­ing sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture prac­tices were im­por­tant, Dr St Mar­tin said he was thank­ful for Namde­v­co for en­cour­ag­ing an en­tire val­ue sys­tem that was sus­tain­able for all el­e­ments of the food sys­tem. RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA