This news article is a production distributed through Caribbean News Service. It is made freely available to your media and we encourage publishing and redistribution, giving credit to Caribbean News Service (CNS).
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Nov 06 2015, CNS – The challenges faced by the region’s famers in getting their produce into hotels and other institutions could soon be a thing of the past.
An official of the Caribbean Agri-business Association (CABA) told Caribbean News Service (CNS) that farmers are usually forced to wait 30 to 90 days for payment, after delivering their produce to the larger retail institutions in the region.
“The farmers simply can’t wait that long to be paid,” CABA President Vassel Stewart told CNS.
Stewart, who spoke with CNS on the sidelines of a two-day regional Agribusiness Forum which wraps up here today, said a Buffer Fund will be set up soon to address this problem.
“At this stage we are in the discussion phase as to how we source the funding for it and what is the best mechanism for managing it. What we have agreed to so far is that you have financial institutions, the micro-finance sub-sector in particular, and the credit unions that are best placed to be the mechanism for retailing the service,” he said.
“So we believe that we can address that issue by working closely with the micro-finance institutions and by ensuring that we source the funding at an interest rate that makes it affordable for the farmers and I’m confident that we know where we can source the funds. What we now need to do it to put the arrangements in place to get it done.”
The Caribbean Agribusiness Forum is organised by the Intra-ACP-EU Technical Centre for Rural and Agricultural Development (CTA) and the Inter-American institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).
There were discussions about whether the farmers’ associations or the Agri-business Association should be the ones to manage the fund but Stewart said the general opinion is that that shouldn’t be the case.
It was agreed that the fund would be best managed by financial institutions that are set up and have the technical capacity to manage such a fund.
Stewart said the fund should be operation within the next 12 months.
“We are looking at it within the year because the point that was made was that funds are around for it. What we have to do now is put in place the mechanism for it,” he said.
“What we anticipate is that given the demand and given the fact that we already have institutions that have been providing that kind of funding, it should be up and running within 12 months.”
He cited the Institute of Private Enterprise Development (IPED), in Guyana, as one such institution.
