BARBADIANS should use their purchasing power as consumers to give black businesses a better deal.

Economist Tennyson Beckles made this call last Friday while delivering the weekly lunchtime lecture at Democratic Labour Party (DLP) headquarters in George Street, St Michael.

Beckles argued that black businesses were at a disadvantage against the white operations in a country being hurt by having "two paralleled paths" of entrepreneurship.

If Barbadians felt that this was "hampering our development", they should organise themselves into consumer groups and determine precisely where they would and would not spend their money, he said, while arguing that it had nothing to do with race but what was right and just.

". . . . If we are to get some modification, we have to organise ourselves at the consumer level," he told the small but vocal gathering.

Consumers "have to make white people understand that if they do not integrate some black people into their businesses, as a result they are going to suffer too",he said.

Beckles said Barbados was too small a country to allow its business system "to go down two paths".

It was not the kind of system that could work in any country, according to the economist.

"In Barbados today we still have two paralleled paths of entrepreneurship," he said.

"We have black (entrepreneurs) and we have white (entrepreneurs) and they are running parallel. There is no integration, no meeting of the mind."

Beckles said the weakness of the system was reflected in the fact that often when a black business became successful it was "taken over" and the businessman had to "start another one". (TY)