It has been almost two years since a delegation from Trinidad and Tobago headed by that country’s Food Production Minister Devant Maraj came to Guyana and held talks with local officials including Agriculture Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy about an arrangement that would have seen large tracts of local lands being leased by Trinidad and Tobago farmers for the creation of mega farms, the produce from which was to have been shipped directly to the twin-island Republic.
After the talks were concluded this newspaper tried without success to learn just what, if anything, had been agreed. We tried again following a follow up visit by Trinidad’s Finance Minister Larry Howai, at which time, we were told, an MOU had been signed. Again we did not get very far as to the details of what had come to be known as the land for farming deal.
In his 2013 budget presentation, however, Minister Howai announced that an agreement had been reached between the two Caricom member countries that would provide 10,000 acres of land in Berbice for immediate agricultural production and that “a further 90,000 acres of Guyana’s land would also be made available to T&T farmers. That was what was reported in the Trinidad Guardian.
The whole idea was that investors in Port of Spain would be invited to farm the lands.
Here in Guyana there had been no indication that farmers had been told anything prior to the Ministry of Agriculture going ahead with the Agreement.
In principle, there was nothing wrong with bringing additional acres of land in Guyana under cultivation if the Trinidadian investors were bringing advanced farming methods and equipment to Guyana from which local farmers could benefit and if, as we had learnt, the initiative had been conceived against the backdrop of reducing food imports into the region.
In the seeming absence of prior consultation with the farmers here, there had been some talk about preferential treatment being given to the Trinidadians and about government intending to repossess lands currently occupied by local farmers and hand these over to the Trinidadians. Minister Ramsammy was forced to deal with these issues after the fact, a circumstance that proper prior consultation might have averted.
Since then and while the Ministry of Agriculture has said that the project is going ahead, there appears to have been little discernible movement either here or in Port of Spain.
What has been loosely described as the land for farming agreement between Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago certainly falls within the ambit of what we have been led to believe is a favoured approach to maximizing regional food production, That approach seeks to mobilize the cumulative resources of Caricom member countries to enable the region as a whole to reap the benefits. One of those resources, is Guyana’s land mass.
That having been said it would appear that the Governments of both Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago erred by keeping their farmers, particularly, in the dark about the land for farming deal. Interestingly, it should be noted that once the farmers in Trinidad had gotten wind of what was happening they immediately threatened protests on the grounds that they had not been consulted and that, moreover there was sufficiently idle land in the oil rich Republic anyway.
Here in Guyana such concerns as were expressed were decidedly more muted which, perhaps, underscores differing levels of tolerance of official indiscretion in the two Caricom countries.
There is nothing wrong – in principle, that is – with Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago seeking to reach an agreement under which the two countries can collaborate to impact positively on regional food security. The problem with the land for farming deal is that up until now we still know far too little about all of its various conditionalities and caveats which is probably why Minister Ramsammy had found himself fending off rumours (which are probably rumours and nothing more) that land would be taken from local farmers and allocated to Trinidadians.
That is exactly the kind of thing that is likely to happen in instances where there is a lack of openness and effective consultations on issues of national interest.
Even now it would be a good thing if the government were to place the MOU in the public domain since, as far as we are aware, its substantive motives appear to be consistent with discourses that have already taken place on the issue of intra-regional cooperation and collaborative initiatives underpinned by public/private sector cooperation in the quest for food security. That having been said it is also a matter of involving the people of the respective Caricom territories in these discourses that have a bearing on matters of national and regional importance. That, in this instance, has decidedly not been the case here in Guyana and we should put that right now.
