The Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines has signed a data management and protection agreement with California-based Quantum Inc., clearing the way for local dasheen and hot pepper farmers to sell into the United States market through two U.S. offtake buyers.
Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Transformation Israel Bruce and Quantum Inc. chief executive Jacques Nack signed the agreement at a joint press conference of the ministries of agriculture and tourism in Kingstown on Monday.
The agreement governs how Quantum collects and handles farm data and is the second of three steps in the arrangement.
It follows memoranda of understanding signed in June in Los Angeles and precedes the purchase contracts between farmers and buyers.
Quantum also released its Quantum Farm app at the press conference. The app is available on Android and iPhone and will be used by field agents to map farms and roads, record crops and acreage, monitor weather and provide digital support to farmers. Enrolment of farmers begins this week.
Happy Produce Global LLC will handle the offtake of dasheen, and Seasons Farm Fresh will handle hot peppers. Both companies are based in California and signed MOUs with the government in June.
Price floor and pooled orders
Bruce said he pushed for a guaranteed minimum price to shield farmers from market swings. Under the arrangement, buyers may pay more if the California market rises but cannot pay less than the agreed floor if it falls.
“You are guaranteed a stabilised price for the lifespan of this,” Bruce said.
Because average local holdings run two to four acres, Quantum will pool supply through what Nack called cohorts.
Buyer orders are presented to groups of farmers who opt in by delivery window, allowing many growers, rather than one or two, to fill a single export order.
Nack said Quantum charges no brokerage fee, which he said should leave farmers with a larger share of the trade value.
Data before dasheen
Nack said the data agreement comes first because export contracts depend on knowing, with traceable certainty, how much produce is in the ground.
“We do not have a production problem in St. Vincent,” he said. “What is really hard is everything else around the growing.”
He said a farmer planting today is “planting on a guess” as weather, buyers and varieties have all changed.
The platform allows buyers to contract for produce from the moment it is planted. Dasheen takes roughly nine months to mature.
Nack said the agreement covers acreage, crops and planting information but excludes personal identification.
“We’re not grabbing and taking IDs or anything like that,” he said, adding that he has served as an expert witness on data protection and privacy law in United States courts.
He said the data cannot be gathered remotely because dasheen grows underground. “There is no satellite that tells you about how much dasheen is under a particular farm,” he said.
Quantum has hired local Vincentians as field agents, beginning with ground liaison Uza Pope.
Bruce said the company’s decision to employ Vincentians directly was a key takeaway from the briefing, and that additional employment would follow at aggregation depots handling buying, washing, packaging and shipment.
The Quantum team was scheduled to visit Queensbury on Tuesday, Greggs on Wednesday and the Mesopotamia Valley on Thursday. The team visited a sea moss operation in Bequia on Sunday.
Nack, addressing farmer scepticism about past announcements, said, “Judge us on the first order. Judge us on the first container that ships.”
Tourism Minister cites visitor spend
Minister of Tourism, Civil Aviation and Sustainable Development Kishore Shallow said agriculture determines how much visitor spending remains in the country.
Shallow said St. Vincent and the Grenadines currently captures about US$59 per visitor, placing it at the lower end of the region.
On a hypothetical US$500 million in visitor spend, he said, retaining an additional 10 per cent would keep US$50 million in the local economy.
He proposed farm-to-table visitor experiences in rural areas and said the wider target is the approximately US$2.6 billion in annual visitor expenditure across the OECS.
Shallow said hoteliers have long cited inconsistency of quantity, quality and cost as obstacles to buying locally.
Bruce said the ministry is also testing cameras for pre-harvest crop monitoring, with two units currently in use and a proposed initial purchase of 1,000 for four pilot programmes.
He said officials will meet the government information services department to connect Quantum to the national agricultural market information system.