Charges of foot-dragging by the vast majority of Caribbean Community (Caricom) governments in pursuit of their commitments towards the fulfilment of the Jagdeo Initiative on Agriculture in the region have been raised by Antigua’s Agriculture Minister Hilson Baptiste.
According to Baptiste, while community member countries were individually assigned responsibility for undertaking the ten binding constraints to accelerating growth in the region’s agriculture sector and articulating the ten necessary interventions, his is the only Agriculture Ministry in the region that has completed the assignment so far. “We were all supposed to submit that black book as to the way forward for each of these constraints. The deadline has come and gone . I didn’t meet the deadline but I submitted mine already, but my report can’t go anywhere unless they submit theirs,” Baptiste is quoted in the February 21 issue of the Barbados Nation as saying.
Antigua was assigned to address the issues of risk management and praedial larceny and according to Baptiste, his is the only government so far to have submitted its report and findings to the Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED).
Baptiste’s protestations over what he sees as the dilatoriness of Caricom governments in meeting the initial requirements for the full and effective implementation of the Jagdeo Initiative come amidst reports that the region continues to import increasing quantities of selected agricultural produce from North America, primarily to meet tourist tastes.
The Jagdeo Initiative, which envisages a region-wide initiative for enhancing the performance of the agricultural and agro-processing production with the dual purpose of enhancing regional food security and maximizing extra-regional market opportunities, identifies and defines key, crucial and binding constraints to the realization of those objectives and assigns member countries to develop and implement targeted, focused and practical interventions at both the regional and national levels aimed at overcoming those constraints.
The initiative which is being spearheaded by President Bharrat Jagdeo and has been endorsed by the region has cited limited financing, inadequate new investments, outdated and inefficient agricultural health and food safety systems, inadequate research and development, fragmented and unorganized private sector, insufficient land and water distribution and management systems, deficient and uncoordinated risk management measures and inadequate transport systems as constraints.
Baptiste’s remarks regarding the non-completion of the tasks assigned to Caricom member states follows concerns expressed by Guyanese officials regarding what is felt to be a generous measure of indifference on the part of some governments to accelerating agricultural production at the domestic level, one of the pursuits envisaged under the Jagdeo Initiative. The enhancement of regional risk management measures, one of the issues on which Antigua has been assigned to report and provide remedial recommendations, is considered to be a key element in the furtherance of the objectives of the Jagdeo Initiative. Deficient crop insurance mechanisms have been identified as a critical constraint to more private sector investment in major agricultural projects in the region as commercial banks and other lending institutions have demonstrated an aversion to risk-taking in the sector on account of the vagaries of the weather in the region. Regional and extra-regional investments in mega-farms in countries like Guyana and Belize have been mooted in discussions on enhancing the regional agricultural sector. These, however, have, up until now, failed to advance further on account of uncertainties associated primarily with investment exposure on account of the absence of adequate regional crop insurance mechanisms.
Large scale agriculture in the Caribbean has traditionally been a private sector pursuit though in some countries in the region, the sector has failed to attract the kind of mega investment necessary to impact significantly in foreign earnings, the exceptions to this being rice and sugar, which have traditionally been major foreign exchange earners for Guyana. In Guyana, some initiatives have already been taken at the level of the Ministry of Agriculture to improve crop insurance facilities while the World Bank has committed to helping the region create a structured regional crop insurance mechanism. Some regional insurance companies have also undertaken to begin to look more closely at the possibility of providing risk insurance in the sector.
Baptiste is also concerned that any overall strategy for boosting the viability of the agriculture sector in the region takes into consideration limitations in transportation which, he says, is one of the biggest problems with trade in the region.
Meanwhile, the urgency of hastening the pace of the Jagdeo Initiative has been underlined by the World Food Organization’s sub-regional coordinator Florita Kentish who, in a statement last week, reminded Caricom member countries of the importance of embracing agriculture as an important sector in the economies of the region. Noting that figures across the region “still show a very large import bill” Kentish said those imports include “basic foods” which can be produced in the Caribbean. Regional growth in the agricultural sector, Kentish said, should focus on food security if only because the Caribbean “is prone to disasters of all kinds and some disasters cut us off from supplies from outside.”
