By Johann Earle
President Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday challenged the participants of the Regional Agriculture Investment Forum to keep the speeches short and get down to brass tacks so that investment and production become a reality.
“It’s the projects that matter and not the chat,” Jagdeo said.
“The sector has suffered from international and regional neglect for years,” he said pointing out that other sectors were given priority.
Reacting to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) summit in Rome a few days ago, the President said that it bothers him that in this day and age there needs to be a food summit.
Jagdeo has been instrumental in pushing the region to think about how best to reposition agriculture and had been talking about it for some years. The Jagdeo Initiative was drafted with the intention of meeting this repositioning objective.
The aim of the Investment Forum – born out of the Jagdeo Initiative – is to bring governments, investors, and bankers and insurance companies together with a view to matching projects with funding.
The President added that there has been significant decline in investment and financing by banks in the agriculture sector. He said that there were many reasons for this and it is hoped that this forum could address some of these concerns.
Out of the nine or so constraints identified, it is hoped that the constraint of lack of investment and capital is addressed during, and after the forum.
He said that the objective is to make agriculture feasible and attractive so that banks could lend money to the sector. But he noted that the work in the region has commenced with a view to addressing these constraints to successful agriculture.
The President pointed out that the region has US$1.5 billion in agri opportunities and these were in the specific areas of cereals, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, meats, sugar, fish and ingredients for livestock. Overall, the region has a food import bill of US$3 billion annually.
Jagdeo reiterated that Governments should give fiscal incentives to agriculture projects in a similar fashion to incentives in other areas, such as hotels for the promotion of tourism. Earlier in the week, he had announced that the Government of Guyana was willing to waive the Corporate Tax on loans taken by investors to develop the sector. “We need to make sure that there is minimum risks to banks,” he said, and asked whether there could not be established a regional scheme to insure loans to the agriculture sector.
Jagdeo believes that in all the efforts, Government should have a facilitating role and not make direct investments in agriculture, something the private sector should be doing. But he bemoaned the absence of many large companies in the region at the forum. He said that some of these only come to such events when the status quo is threatened.
Speaking on the impact of global climate change, the President said that the impact is greatest in countries like those in the region which are least capable of dealing with the consequences of climate change. He said that the international framework that will come after the end of the life of the Kyoto Protocol must have funds available for nations such as these for adaptation and mitigation. He said that any framework without these will be an unfair one.
“It must not be in a token fashion like the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in which very little resources flowed to the Caribbean,” he said. “Our policy in the Caribbean has to be dual nature, first looking at the contribution that the forest makes and [markets for this] and having a predictable framework for adaptation and mitigation,” said President Jagdeo. “I hope that we don’t drop the ball on this…I don’t see strong enough negotiation [in the region],” he said, adding that the region was dormant in negotiation when the Kyoto Protocol was being drafted.
According to the President, he still believes that bio fuels have a future in the fight against the harm caused by fossil fuels, “but you can do so without affecting food supply.” He said that in Guyana, 40,000 acres of land have been dedicated to bio fuels and this he said would not affect agriculture. He added that there needs to be more focus on the more efficient means to bio fuels solutions and stated that use of corn is an inefficient pathway to bio fuels since the returns were poor.
He said: “If we keep blaming each other we will never find solutions and this problem requires a global solution.”
Sacred cows
Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves, who spoke at the opening ceremony after President Jagdeo, said that in all the considerations on agriculture, the issue of labour cannot be left out. He said too that countries in the region have to organise their internal market system much better than what obtains at present.
“This is a complex subject which requires a list of detailed considerations,” Prime Minister Gonsalves said, adding that a lot of the ideas now being talked about have been considered in the past, but not successfully implemented because of the region’s choosing to hold on to “sacred cows.”
“Both the State and Private Sector have to do better,” he said. The Prime Minister, who has a background in farming, said that he hopes to go back to the land when his time as a Prime Minister is over and quipped that in farming there is better job security.
The two-day event concludes today but the delegates will go on field trips to Berbice and to an aquaculture farm at Canal No. 2, West Bank Demerara courtesy of the Government of Guyana.
