Farmers have cocoa concerns

03.JUNE.11

Editor: Two professionals, Dr. Sylvester Lynch and C.I. Martin, gave us their technical opinion in Searchlight last week about what we can do about cocoa production here.{{more}} Martin was cautious, Lynch was optimistic, but both of them placed a challenge to get up and get at the dragging feet of our agriculture officials. It is time, high time, for us as farmers to give our opinion, too, about producing cocoa-chocolate here in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. We should think seriously, if we want to make good business, of not waiting for the agriculture department to wake up, but of putting those who are interested, like Lynch, Martin and others, to do some work for us. Yes, I hear you say that we can’t pay big salaries to people like them, and then you say, that these men become parasites even when the industry is in trouble, they still enjoy even bigger salaries. Let us not degrade ourselves, please. As a body of farmers, just as how the state uses tax money and money from the international community to pay for services, we, too, can do so, but we must do so as an organized and responsible body, and we can employ skilled persons properly. Let us see ourselves in that light and discuss cocoa-chocolate seriously. What we must know?

As farmers, we must know (a) what it costs to produce 1 acre of cocoa, (b) how much we can earn in the 1st five years from the mixed crop and the coca yields, (c) how much we can make a year when the crop is in full swing from the cacao beans, and (d) what added value or second income we can bargain for or earn from chocolate section of the industry? We need answers to those questions right now or not far from now as we consider our way ahead. And my approach is for us to come together as a body and ask for support, locally and overseas, to get some indicative answers to these concerns that we have. One of the committees we could set up can look for help from the Agriculture faculty of the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, as well as the Cocoa Board in Grenada, and other sources as well. We don’t have to say ‘I go plant cacao’ before we have the facts – although some of us done say so without the facts!

And so the first question for us as farmers is this: Are we ready to meet together and talk together and speak our concerns and our hopes to each other as we organize to look at the feasibility of cacao-chocolate? And we must not lose sight of the second major concern – to select a chocolate industry partner with whom we can negotiate to secure earnings from producing quality chocolate products.

I don’t think that we need a separate agency to call us together in a meeting of farmers. We can talk to each other as we walk to go mountain in the mornings. We can talk on the block, outside and inside the rum shop, in the men’s fellowship meeting, and whenever. After all, is our business and our future we planning.

But still, let me leave an open invitation to anyone of our interested agencies to offer us their resources, whether the Chamber, the Invest SVG, the IICA, the Church, projects Promotion or the Department of Agriculture. Let us take our first steps early this June, 2011. I hope that in the next weeks’ newspapers, more farmers will be writing their opinions about our way ahead. It is time enough, it is our time.



Oscar Allen