Nassau, The Bahamas -- Cooperatives and Credit Unions could soon be subject to new legislation and the Department of Cooperative Development (DCD) will surrender its duties to the Central Bank of The Bahamas. The move will allow the Producer Service Cooperatives to grow a solid foundation from its current position of only one percent.

Agriculture, Marine Resources and Local Government Minister, The Hon. V. Alfred Gray spoke about the vision Sir Lynden Pindling articulated 30 years which is to codify or legalize what he perceives to be what the country has today in the form of cooperative funding. "Cooperatives, without giving any definition to it are an important sector of our country's economic development.

The genesis of cooperatives and credit unions, of course, was to ensure that the average man on the street had access to funding small projects, big projects, and those in between, without having to find the collateral, which banks do often ask for and for which they would seldom qualify, if there was no credit unions / cooperatives to provide that assistance to them," said Minister V. Alfred Gray.

"And that is legendary because I know you know of many people, who but for, the advent of credit unions would never have had access to small or large funding. Meaning they would have had no access to funding at all because they would not have been able to walk in to a bank and access any loan whatsoever.

But with the advent of cooperatives, many of them were able to send their children off to school, pay their bills, and do other things which the cooperatives allowed them to do without them having to go through the riggers of finding collateral and all the things that attend to the accessing of loans in the average commercial banks."

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