Agriculture: Seizing the moment, grasping the opportunity
This newspaper has already commented on what it believes to be the enhanced significance of Guyana’s agricultural sector as a critical element in the national response to the impact of the global economic crisis.
We believe that its importance is located, first, in its potential as a foreign exchange earner since the global economic crisis has done little to staunch the demand for food both in the region and beyond. Secondly, in circumstances where rising imported food prices will continue to place further strain on reduced consumer liquidity, particularly among wage earners, significant increases in local agricultural production will render food prices much more affordable. Thirdly, subsistence and small-scale agricultural pursuits can serve both as income subsidies for wage earners and as alternative employment for persons who have already lost their jobs in other sectors and those who are likely to lose their jobs in the period ahead.
Of course, there is no shortage of challenges to the objective of realizing an enhanced agricultural sector. Initiatives to attract external investor interest in the sector are yet to bear any significant fruit and while the local private sector is on record as advocating more significant investments in farming, not a great deal has materialized on that front up to this time.
Last week we spoke with a senior commercial bank official who told us that while more lending to the agricultural sector is desirable, this is likely to materialize only if and when more assurances are forthcoming with regard to reducing the risks associated with putting money into the sector.
Arising out of all this it would appear that taking the agricultural sector forward requires a multi-stakeholder approach involving government, traditional farmers, larger investors, banks, micro-financing institutions and, frankly, just about anyone with the available land space and disposition for farming. What also arises out of this challenging equation is the need for quantum attitudinal changes towards agriculture on the parts of the stakeholders, particularly the banks and the businessmen.
The other critical challenge lies squarely at the feet of the government and that challenge is the creation of a considerably expanded technical, information and research support infrastructure to support a modern and expanded agricultural sector.
Based on the evidence of last week’s forum organised by Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud there appears to be an awareness on the part of the government of the need for a multi-stakeholder approach to broadening and strengthening the sector, and the discourses that ensued at the “Round Table” (though the actual format of the forum could hardly have been described as a Round Table) suggests that there is no shortage of informed opinion as to what it would take to fashion the sector to cause it to realize its full potential.
The problem with brainstorming exercises like last week’s forum is that, invariably, they generate a great deal of useful information which must then be fashioned into some workable format that can be applied in a constructive and practical way and the challenge confronting the Minister and his team is that of extracting the essence of the forum and applying it to what, presumably, is a broader plan for taking the whole sector forward.
It is here that we think that the Minister may need a much smaller multi-stakeholder team comprising representatives from the sectors to which we referred earlier who can work together and assiduously, to address and find ways to resolve all the various challenges that inhere in what we seek to accomplish with the agricultural sector. In other words, the eventual implementation of a plan to make the agricultural sector the ‘elite regiment’ of the national response to the global economic crisis must be undergirded by a carefully planned and thought-through strategy that takes account of all that it seeks to accomplish and all the hurdles that it has to cross in pursuit of its goals.
We believe that the coincidence of a global economic crisis and a global food crisis offers Guyana – with its manifest potential to produce huge volumes of food – the opportunity both to ride out the crisis more effectively than many other developing countries as well as to considerably expand and modernize the sector for the future. It would be an unpardonable failure on our part to miss this opportunity.
