Stakeholders in agriculture converged at the Methodist Church Hall on Wednesday, June 13th for the first Business Round Table Discussion on the OECS Agriculture Competitiveness AGRICOM Project, which aims to enhance markets and sales for competitively selected farmers, fisher folk and their allied aggregators.
Speaking during the discussion, Permanent Secretary (PS) in the Ministry of Agriculture Raymond Ryan, said the project seeks to address the area of marketing in the agricultural sector.
He noted that the project will utilize a value chain alliance approach by linking stakeholders along the value chains to facilitate the preparedness of technically feasible and financially viable business plans with support from the project.
The Agriculture P.S pointed out that the project has four major components namely the support for preparation of Business Plans, the implementation of business plans, general agriculture services and enabling environment and project monitoring and evaluation.
He noted that the expected outcomes of the project are: to improve marketing performances both domestic and export, generate quality jobs with emphasis on youth and women, increase annual sales of farmers and fishers, aggregators and agro-processors, improve technology adopted and increase labour productivity.