26 May 2015 - Business View Caribbean
to work again,” said Glendene Bartlett, the organiza-
tion’s Chief Executive Officer. “It still has not reached
the potential that they thought it would have reached
by now. But we’re working toward it.”
BADMC has its own board of directors and is not tech-
nically a division of the Ministry of Agriculture, but nev-
ertheless reports to it as a “parent ministry,” she said.
Bartlett oversees an annual budget of $21 million,
which funds the various aforementioned commercial,
retail and administration tasks.
Most of her workdays are typically taken up with land
leases – where the corporation negotiates rates and
leases land to farmers without property of their own –
as well as irrigation services and extension services,
which provide crop and production advice to farmers
to maximize their outputs.
A unique challenge the sector faces in Barbados, as
opposed to other locales, is a high labor cost.
In addition, much of the land that might have been
suitable for agricultural pursuits has instead been pur-
chased and reserved for other endeavors because of
a higher payoff available to land owners.
“We have set pricing through the unions, so, therefore,
we have to have production ramped up to offset the
price of the labor,” she said. “The cost of living here
is high, so the wages and salaries are normally set to
meet that cost. Barbados is a very small island, too,
and persons have taken a lot of the land out of agricul-
ture, because they can get more selling it to develop to
build homes. That’s what we are trying to reverse now,
because a lot of the land has been allowed to lie idle.
“Most of it does belong to private persons.”
And the reality of how agriculture is viewed makes the
job of the sector’s No. 1 fan particularly tough.
BEST PRACTICES IN BUSINESS
