ST. GEORGE’S, Grenada, Sept 1, CMC – The Director General of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), Dr. Didacus Jules, Tuesday urged governments of the sub-region to provide access to crown lands on transparent terms and at rates that will allow young people to make a significant contribution to the agricultural development in the region.
Addressing the opening ceremony of the OECS Youth and Women in Agriculture Symposium, here, Jules said that the access to the crown lands must be such that “a young farmer can pay under a 10-year arrangement that a bank can recognise as collateral.
“Every other intervention we make is diminished if a young person has nowhere to stand,” Jules said, urging also that inclusion must be structural and not ceremonial.
He said that persons with disability had registered for this symposium in meaningful numbers, urging them to “design your forum, your training, and your financial instruments so that they are not an afterthought”.
The Castries-based OECS Commission, in collaboration with Grenada’s Ministry of Agriculture, Lands & Forestry, is hosting the system intended to equip participants with practical training in agribusiness development, climate-smart agriculture, digital innovation, leadership, and access to finance and markets.
The organisers said that key focus areas include climate-resilient farming, agribusiness and digital skills, finance and market access as well as regional networking and policy.
Jules told the audience that he hopes the symposium produces produce more than goodwill, including that the OECS Agriculture Forum for Youth stop being a proposal and become an institution with names, a structure, and a mandate, which even though supported by the OECS Commission and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) “must belong to you.
“It must belong to you, or it will not survive us,” he said, adding also that the information portal be delivered, co-managed by the OECS Commission and IICA with a target date agreed before the delegates leave Grenada.
Jules told the symposium that the Caribbean region is living through a period of accelerating entropy and that the global order that small states had managed to navigate ”is coming apart faster than it is being rebuilt.
“Trade rules are being rewritten unilaterally and if you listen to the news, almost every hour there are new disputes. Tariffs are being deployed as instruments of coercion. Development assistance is being cut, redirected, or made conditional on things that have nothing to do with development.”
He said shipping costs and insurance premiums for small island states increase with every storm season and “the multilateral institutions we relied upon to arbitrate fairness are themselves on the strain”.
He said such an environment also provides for the region to be importers of the overwhelming majority of what it consumes at a cost of US$658 million every year.
“That is money that leaves this region and never returns. Every dollar of that import bill is a dollar of vulnerability. It is a dollar we cannot spend on our schools. It is a dollar that gives someone else leverage over what our children eat,” Jules said.
The OECS Director General said that this is the honest frame for this symposium, adding “we are not here because agriculture is a nice idea for young people.
“We are here because in a fracturing world, the capacity to feed ourselves is the most concrete expression of sovereignty available to a small state. If you cannot feed yourself, you’re dead.”
He said also that the average age of Caribbean farmers indicates that this capacity is one generation away from being lost.
But Jules said that against this backdrop, he was commending the regional governments of the sub-region who in October 2024, at a special meeting of the Council of Ministers Agriculture in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, took a decision that seemed administrative ”but was in fact very profound.
“They folded women into the youth in agriculture programme on the reasoning that the barriers are substantially the same. Land, finance, recognition, and a seat where decisions are made.
“That decision is the reason that this is a women and youth symposium and it deserves to be recorded. Then of their own accord, the organisations of differently abled persons got involved and have unquestionably established their capacity and their right to be active in this venture,” he said, giving examples of a business venture in St. Lucia where an aquaponics facility has been set up by the Association of Persons with Disabilities or the Differently Abled.
He said it is run by three persons, one who is wheelchair-bound, another who is blind and the third who is a paraplegic.
Jules said that in May 2025, in Costa Rica, “something rarer happened” when OECS agriculture ministers were presented with a roadmap for the future development of agriculture in the sub-region.
He said the visit to Costa Rica received support from IICA and the European Union and that since that visit “we have run the Climate Smart Agriculture and Sustainable Entrepreneurship Workshop in St. Lucia, AI and data in agriculture, drones, small-scale mechanisation, soil and water management, business planning, and financial literacy.
He said in October last year an OECS delegation visited Spain to study cooperative and social economy models in agri-food and fisheries, which has already resulted in successes for small farmers in Dominica and Montserrat.
But Jules acknowledged that despite the successes, land access remains the hardest of the demands for farmers.
“The interest rate question at our financial institutions remains largely unsolved. The one-stop information portal you ask for grants, land, markets, technical guidance in one place, is not yet fully built.
“These remain a work in progress that we must accelerate. The request for agricultural scholarships, we expect will soon be addressed as we will be meeting with IICA next month to finalise the agribusiness diploma programme for youth and women.
“So let this symposium produce more than goodwill” he said, reminding the delegates that a region does not become food security by declaration.
“It becomes secure, food secure, one farm, one cooperative, one young woman, one differently-abled entrepreneur with a business plan at a time.”
CMC/ah/ir/2026