-market-led approach being cultivated
As the government seeks to build a “new agriculture”, several projects underway will modernize local farming with the results expected to be seen in three to five years.
In the meantime, with the Grow More Food campaign well underway, export of produce has risen, Minister of Agriculture, Robert Persaud says. “We have been able to achieve the indicators we have set ourselves”, the Minister said in a recent interview.
Two long-term strategic projects, the Agricultural Diversification Programme and the Rural Enterprise and Agricultural Development (READ) programme are off and running and these will change the agriculture landscape and modernize agriculture. Persaud said that the results will be seen in three to five years. The Grow More Food campaign, launched last year, is the framework within which interventions are being made, he added, noting that the Ministry is looking at all the requirements needed to be a big agricultural player and are putting these together.
The Agriculture Minister acknowledged that farmers and others have had difficulties but said that these have not been at a level where production has dropped or consumers could not access the products. He declared that in some cases, there has been overproduction and the New Guyana Marketing Corporation has to aggressively search for markets. Stabroek News requested export data from the Ministry but only partial data was supplied and thought it was promised that full data for 2007 and 2008 would be made available, up to press time, it was not received. The data would be crucial in establishing whether the grow more food campaign has resulted in a sustained increase in agricultural output and whether export earnings have increased.
For the first three months of this year, export data showed just over 2.4 million kilos of produce was exported. The highest figure was for January when just over 1.5 million kilograms of produce was exported and this dropped to 394 553 kilos in March. Last year, according to the 2009 Budget, the ‘other crops’ sub-sector grew by 7.7 percent.
Persaud said that people are looking to get into farming. “There is heavy competition for land for farming. I have not seen this type of interest in many, many years in terms of persons looking for land”, he disclosed. “Every day there is no less than a dozen persons would contact my office looking for land for agriculture or looking to regularize or looking for additional land”, he said. The Minister commented that in agriculture there are peaks and troughs, but people recognize that in the long term, it is a sustainable enterprise. In this light, he said that with population growth, the scarcity of arable lands and freshwater supply and climate change, food supply and availability will always be an issue. “Countries like us once we are able to do what we are doing right and position ourselves, we stand in the long term to benefit and people see that”.
In seeking land, a lot of interest has been shown in the Linden-Soesdyke highway area. The minister posited that people recognize the advantages there, namely that it is close and the weather challenges are less challenging. He said that in the future, a proper agri-export facility will be set up at Timehri.
Interest has also been shown in the intermediate savannahs for cattle; large scale rice cultivation in the Rupununi; crops for bio-fuel and small farms in the Canje basin. Different areas have their own “pull”, he stated. In traditional farming areas such as the West Demerara and Black Bush polder, the area under cultivation has been widening. A lot of exports have been taking place from Berbice to Suriname, the Minister disclosed.
Meantime, Persaud noted that agriculture is sensitive and prices can be volatile. “We remain very vulnerable to what takes place in the global marketplace and we want people to understand that because that is unpredictable but at the same time, locally we have been putting in place cushions, we have been trying to work with the different sectors to allow our farmers, to allow our producers to ride some of those unpredictable waves in terms of price movement, in terms of other difficulties which we may have.”
He observed that Guyana exports 80% of its major agricultural commodities and wants to export much more because internal consumption is limited.
Earlier, crops such as pepper and plantain had been identified as “early winners” and Persaud said that the list is not restricted. He stated that there are other crops being pursued and the Ministry is using a cluster approach and there is the aquaculture cluster, the fruits cluster, the vegetable cluster and “we are looking at those that can be developed and Guyana can be known as a lead producer or exporter of these particular crops”. The programme is flexible, he said, and is market-led.
According to the Minister, a lot of progress has been made on peppers and there is potential in a range of other crops. “We want to make the agri-diversification project so robust that it does not ride on one or two crops alone or one or two activities but will be able to allow our farmers to make adjustments to take care of the demand in the market”, he said. A lot will be happening in terms of processing, he added.
He said that the major obstacle to Agriculture is climate change due to the coast’s vulnerability to weather related issues and thus there is a need to invest in adaptation infrastructure. In terms of value-added processing, he stated that the cost of energy is an impediment. He noted that rehabilitation of infrastructure has been ongoing
Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy pulls the efforts together, he said, and Guyana can show that the country can develop a modern and a vibrant agriculture sector, open new frontiers for agriculture and at the same time, do it in a very sustainable way.
