In the matter of the recently announced interest on the part of Trinidad and Tobago in working with Guyana towards the creation of a regional food security plan, Head of Resource Mobilization at the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI) Maurice Wilson has more or less told the supposed interested parties to put up or shut up.
Wilson is quoted in the Wednesday, October 17 issue of the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian as saying that while the announcement about possible serious T&T investments in major agricultural projects utilizing Guyana’s vast land space is “exactly what we want,” he strongly implied that the perceived agricultural projects were no more than pipe dreams unless more substantial investments are made to ensure their realization.
Wilson was one of a number of regional officials who utilized a recent media sensitization forum in Antigua to depart sharply from the traditional posture of patronage which both governments and the private sector have assumed in the matter the region’s food security. A succession of meetings of regional Agriculture Ministers, Heads of Government and Caricom bureaucrats have gotten the hoped-for regional food plan nowhere and removed the ‘shine’ from former Guyana President Bharrat Jagdeo’s’ Caricom food production plan commonly known as the Jagdeo Initiative.
While the past few years have witnessed several discussions on externally-funded mega-farms located in the food-growing regions of Guyana, Wilson said that such projects could only proceed with the integral involvement of the regional sector which, at the end of the day, would have to put up the money for the projects.
Antigua and Barbuda Agriculture Minister Hilson Batiste also took aim at the sloth and indifference that had attended the envisaged regional food security plan. He is quoted in the Guardian article as criticizing his regional counterparts for failing to act on years of research and planning in the matter of a regional food plan adding that the region had too often failed to meet regional food production targets and to implement a long-standing list of policies and plans. “Ministers do not do their work,” Batiste said, honing in on what he described as their failure to convert “talk and talk and talk” into concerted action to meet the food production needs of the region. The problem, he said, had to do in part with the frequent changes in politicians holding ministerial posts across the region.
A project led by the Cooperative Citrus Growers Association of Trinidad and Tobago involving the production of up to 5,000 acres of land in Guyana is currently underway.
