Ladies and Gentlemen, good morning.

We are pleased to announce the 2020 Agri-Business Expo will be held on Friday March 27th and Saturday March 28th at the Gladstone Road site.

Our committee has been working assiduously to put on an event that will showcase the best aspects of our nation’s farmers, producers, artisans, suppliers and agri-business professionals over two days of information, entertainment and sharing.

This year’s theme, “Let’s Get Smart with Agriculture. Grow Local, Eat Fresh” is more than appropriate for the time we are in as a sector and a country. 2019 saw the most devastating hurricane in history to hit land. Hurricane Dorian visited two of our three biggest contributing islands to our agricultural output - Abaco and Grand Bahama.

The farming communities were particularly devastated in terms of the loss of assets, salt intrusion on land, the loss of all, but one seafood processing plant on Grand Bahama, the loss of operating capacity for our country’s biggest poultry producer and the shutdown of dozens of farms on both islands.

The human loss was even more devastating as many remain unaccounted for while others lost their lives in the storm. Many have simply up and left those islands.

Our country is in the direct path of hurricanes, which, over the past ten years, have become more frequent and increasingly stronger. The science says the frequency and strength of the storms is directly tied to the generation of harmful emissions from larger developed countries. We have no real direct input in this. We have made our position known on the international stage at various conferences around the world as well as recently on American television with the Prime Minister’s interview on 60 Minutes. But this alone, is not enough.

Hence, the theme this year “Let’s Get Smart with Agriculture. Eat local, Eat Fresh”.

Our ministry has begun a push for the development of more climate smart technologies to be implemented by our farmers in the development of their greenhouses, shade houses, animal pens and other approaches. We have engaged our international partners - CARDI, FAO and IICA and they are on board to assist. In short order, demonstration models of climate smart approaches will be visible at the Gladstone Road Agricultural Complex. These are a part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Our partners in the Ministry of Education, along with BAMSI and the Department of Cooperatives have begun a number of climate smart initiatives in our schools, including aquaponics programs.

These are the beginning steps. We have more to do and farther to go and this is why it is critical to present this approach at this year’s Expo. Everything is scalable. While we are limited in what we can do to prevent the kinds of environmental impacts created by our bigger neighbors, we can still do a lot to protect our food security by taking on approaches that work.

This year’s Expo will continue the tradition of exposure, teaching and sharing at the Gladstone Road site. We anticipate dozens of vendors from all aspects of our sector as well as food, drinks and artisanal creations by a number of our country’s craftspeople. We will have a number of presentations designed to educate not only farmers but the wider community and of course, showcase what we are doing and how we are doing it. Our cooking demonstrations featuring top chefs focusing on selected produce and proteins will be back again as will our competitions, most notably, the Bahamas Hot Pepper Eating Championships. As I began, I thank the media for their continued support of Expo and I invite you all to be there March 27th and 28th.

Thank you.