Another call to local fruit and vegetable producers

August b18, 2023  –WILLEMSTAD – As part of better support for local producers, the Ministry of Economic Development (MEO) has developed a database for the agricultural sector in which MEO will register all local fruit and vegetable producers who conduct business in this area. To start achieving this, MEO initiated a call to local fruit and vegetable producers in July to register. The goal of this registration is to facilitate the connection between producers and supermarkets/distributors but also to improve the process of obtaining an exemption when importing certain fruits and vegetables (import exemption). Besides all this, having a clear overview of what we produce and sell locally in the agricultural sector helps MEO provide better protection from the Government to local fruit and vegetable producers. MEO has already begun working on necessary adaptations to the exemption law for the import of fruits and vegetables, but for these adaptations to align better with the local situation, we need information directly from the local producers. 

Based on the first call, MEO has already received responses from various local producers. To allow those who did not receive the previous call or did not have a chance to register, MEO is extending the call one more time to local fruit and vegetable producers conducting business in this sector, to register by Friday, September 1, 2023, via the following link: https://bit.ly/DatabaseAgrario 

After registration, MEO will arrange a meeting with the producer to personally input all data into the database. The data from this database will be used exclusively by MEO for the protection of local producers through import exemption. 

With the introduction of this database, MEO aims to have better communication with local agriculturists to safeguard their interests and limit the import of products that are locally produced.