After days of talks at Caribbean Week of Agriculture, Green calls for action

CORAL SPRING, Trelawny — Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Mining Floyd Green is calling for action following days of discussions at the Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA), held at the Ocean Coral Spring Resort here. “When we finish COTED [Council for Trade and Economic Development] the real work starts, because if all we do here is talk and it doesn’t impact the farmer or the fisher in our respective countries, we would have wasted our time in Jamaica,” Green said during a press conference last Friday. He was speaking shortly before Caribbean ministers of agriculture and other stakeholders met for COTED. The 20th Caribbean Week of Agriculture is guided by regional governance through The Alliance for Sustainable Development of Agriculture and the Rural Milieu, and features ministerial leadership from COTED on agriculture. “We must implement our action, our talk.

We must ensure that COTED is tracking the commitments that we have made, and that when we come back to CWA we are not discussing the same things over and over but that we’re moving forward and building upon the foundation that has been set,” he insisted. Since September 27 more than 1,000 attendees have been sharing ideas and discussing policies aimed at improving agriculture across the Caribbean region. “We have had over 14 ministers; we have had multiple, multiple delegations from over 40 countries join us here in Jamaica, and for us, it’s with a clear purpose — which is to advance the work across the region to transform our agricultural ecosystem,” he declared. Among the areas examined, Green said, was the issue of employment and the treatment of labour within the region. “We also have to ensure that the issue of labour is dealt with. And we believe that Dominica has a wonderful model that they…