Dear Editor,
Prime Minister Perry Gladstone Christie really needs to come clean and tell the Bahamian people what is really going on with the Bahamas Agriculture and Marine Science Institute (BAMSI) in Andros. The leader of the opposition, Dr. Hubert Minnis has caught him off guard again and he needs to step up now.
For a politician who lacks acumen according the critics, Minnis is besting Christie at every turn.
He checked him on the referendum legislation. He has asked questions about value-added tax (VAT) that this administration can't seem to find answers for, and now BAMSI is being exposed as a $27 million waste of tax payers' money.
He has the PM ducking; the chairman of the PLP is fumbling for an explanation. The president of BAMSI, Godfrey Eneas, is lost for words, and Dr. Ian Strachan of COB is being set up as the fall guy on the opening of BAMSI and how it is being structured.
Roberts said that the leader of the opposition doesn't understand policies, but perhaps the PLP chairman can explain to the people of The Bahamas what the PLP's policy on is on agriculture, if there is one.
Truth be told, the last reasonable policy on agriculture was under the UBP when the produce exchange in Nassau was the marketing and distribution center for agricultural and marine products throughout The Bahamas.
The farm complex on Potter's Cay is a sad and sick indictment on a government that claims to have a policy on producing quality food for Bahamians. Up until the mid 1960s, Exuma and Long Island produced all the mutton consumed in The Bahamas. Now our mutton comes mostly from old wool sheep in Australia.
Exuma, Eleuthera and Cat Island farmers produced some of the best tomatoes, pineapples, watermelons and citrus to be found anywhere, and the Ministry of Finance would impose flexible tariff rates on imported produce. Exuma, Eleuthera, Abaco and Cat Island once exported produce as far away to the U.S. and England; now, they can't truck produce a half-hour's drive to hotels that populate their islands.
Our traditional farmers need assistance in modern farming techniques. We have the perfect soil and climatic conditions to support a wide variety of growing techniques, including greenhouse agriculture, but what farmers need is real advice on how to grow the foodstuff that the modern consumer and the hotel industry needs. Nearly every county in the world subsidizes agriculture to some degree, but perhaps we are too sophisticated to do that in The Bahamas.
Nearly every country serious about agriculture supports research facilities that provide farmers with extensions services, with qualified and trained experts. There are no such experts in the Family Islands and when they do make an attempt to provide such services it is again a party supporter with no training or background in agriculture and who takes his or her cue from the current minister, who visits farms in his polyester suit.
Real assistance to farmers is not forthcoming from this government. The Ministry of Agriculture is a ministry of processing permits for large-scale food importers and friends and relatives of PLP supporters. This year the government allocated $7,000 for land clearance for farmers in Exuma. This is an insult - perhaps the PM should take the $9 million they are allocating to the already disliked Carnival and assist farmers with land clearance and irrigation programs.
Perhaps the minister of agriculture can also explain to the Bahamian people the permitting process for the landscape of Baha Mar and who received the $12 million contract to import plants from Florida.
The prime minister, Roberts and V. Alfred Gray should first answer the leader of the opposition's questions on the cost overruns on BAMSI: where the student body is to be drawn from, and why did it cost $27 million to construct an educational complex to host a mere 50 students?
If they could get through that then they should come back to the Bahamian people and tell us of their government's true policy on agriculture, but there is none, and there never was one.
The people of The Bahamas should remember that BAMSI is being built on the old BARTAD site, which was a $6 million independence gift to the people of The Bahamas from the government of the United States and which was designed to change agriculture in The Bahamas. It was built around a training and research center with thousands of acres of cleared land for satellite farms.
It didn't work because politics entered the equation. The farmland was distributed along party lines to PLP supporters who had little interest or inclination in modern farming. One of the biggest land recipients was a relative of the then deputy prime minister.
We should also remember who the minister of agriculture was in the last days of BARTAD when starving cows were dying in the roads in North Andros. It was our own current prime minister.
The PM should also explain the relevance of an association with the University of Miami, a school not noted for agricultural research. Perhaps the University of Florida at Gainesville would have been a better fit, or even Tuskegee, the alma mater of the BAMSI president.
Christie needs to come clean and answer the questions put to him by the leader of the opposition, Minnis, who every day is proving to be a politician with insight, integrity, imagination and conviction, and who, if he can muzzle his chairman, can rebuild the FNM to be the next government of The Bahamas.
- M. Thompson

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