by Trevor Yearwood

The Caribbean's efforts to contain the rise in food prices should include making ports and regional shipping more efficient.

At the same time, the region will need to improve the distribution and marketing of its food products.

President of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), Professor Compton Bourne, offered this advice yesterday during a news conference on the performance of the region's economies last year.

He spoke against the backdrop of Barbados and other CARICOM nations discussing how to reduce the high cost of food items.

"I think part of the solution to the problem is in fact to improve the distribution and marketing of food products,"Bourne told reporters at the CDB's Wildey,
St Michael headquarters.

"There are countries in the region that have considerable food production capacity, but their arrangements for trade in the region are far
from adequate."

This made it very difficult to supply the markets that are experiencing shortages or to provide a cheaper source of commodities to those markets with the existing arrangements, he argued.

"First of all, shipping is very poor within the region," he charged. "Our shipping arrangements are largely geared towards bringing commodities from outside the region to the region, rather than moving commodities between the various islands and countries in
the Caribbean.

"Secondly, our port facilities in the main for CARICOM trade are atrocious, often under-staffed, often not provided with the requisite phyto-sanitary inspection facilities and sometimes characterised
by a bit of hostility towards the trade. . . ."

Bourne also spoke about the trend of substantial borrowing by Caribbean governments.

". . . As a bank, we watch very closely the financial conditions of the Caribbean governments and we do feel that there needs to be care in the amount of debt undertaken by the various countries in the region, especially when that contains conditions that are onerous in terms of the interest rates and the shortness of the maturity periods . . .," he reported.

Against the background of high interest rates and short repayments periods, when countries have to allocate tax revenues to repay and service the debt, it was sometimes at the expense of the economic growth programmes and social services, including health, he pointed out. (TY)