The
Development Planning Unit
Government of the British Virgin Islands

NATIONAL INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

Emerging Issues, Agriculture
(continued)

4.0   THE GOVERNMENT’S POLICY FOR AGRICULTURE DEVELOPMENT

In 1988, the Government took a policy decision to revive the agricultural sector as part of its overall programme to diversify the economy of the BVI. The goal of which is:

GOALS
To produce in a programmed manner, as much as possible of what we eat thus reducing our food import bill; to improve our forest capabilities, and where possible to export agricultural products.

POLICIES
The objective of the new agricultural policy is:

1. To alleviate the problem of farmers aging by attracting young generations of farmers.
2. To bring all usable land in the territory into production of either orchard crops, vegetables, livestock, poultry and ornamentals.
3. To promote backyard gardening in order to reduce the territory’s heavy dependence on import of agricultural products.
4. To encourage utilization of land owned by absentee landlords.
5. To promote an integrated farming system linking farmers with main outlet for marketing of farm production.
6. To help soil and water conservation by developing facilities, e.g. dams, irrigation facilities.
7. To preserve natural beauty of these islands by encouraging soil conservation measures, forestry programme and beautification schemes.

The agricultural policy is geared towards self-reliance in food production for domestic consumption and surplus for export. The policy has been in use since 1988, the impact of this policy is not very effective because the strategies to implement this policy are not well defined. In other words, agriculture development strategy implementation is at a minimum mainly because of problems earmarked in Section 1.5. However, there was a marginal increase of agricultural produce which means if the Government can put extra efforts in the near future BVI can have tremendous increase in food production. The future development of the agricultural sector will depend on effective agricultural policy and development strategies to implement the policies.

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