The Minister of Agriculture would do well to seek to determine with due haste the current status of the Guyana/Trinidad and Tobago land-for-farming deal that may have been struck over two years ago and under which private investors from the twin-island republic were to be allocated large tracts of land here to invest in mega farms.
The idea was one of many that had emerged from the surfeit of regional chatter over Caribbean food security and expressed concerns over an out-of-control regional food bill believed to have been in the region of US$4 billion in 2014. It will be recalled too that this was supposed to be the first really significant development to take place within the framework of the so-called Jagdeo Initiative which was intended to provide a response to concerns over what was perceived to be an ongoing dependence amongst many countries in the region on costly extra-regional food imports.
Although the land for farming understanding had been taken forward to the stage of a memorandum of understanding between the Ministry of Agriculture in Guyana and the Food Security Ministry in Trinidad and Tobago, both sides were vague on the matter of advancing the pace of the agreement. In Port of Spain farmers and their unions were vociferous in their assertions that there were still sufficient available farmlands in the twin-island republic to negate the need to seek out farmlands in Guyana and the business community in Port of Spain remained mum on the issue. Certainly, once it became clear that there was a less than generous measure of enthusiasm for such a deal in Port of Spain, the then minister of agriculture here, Dr Leslie Ramsammy, appeared even more determined to keep the MOU under wraps.
Here in Guyana where the private sector has traditionally been lukewarm on the issue of investment in agriculture (crop insurance has been one of the issues in a country where coastal drainage and irrigation have been major challenges) farmers appeared to oppose what they perceived to be a ruse to hive off the best coastal farmlands to the Trinidadian businessmen and were therefore uneasy about the idea and officials inside the Ministry of Agriculture conceded to this newspaper that high officials in the PPP/C administration had become mindful of the emergence of a vigorous domestic farming lobby opposing the planned mega farmers financed by high rollers from Port of Spain.
With the issue seemingly going nowhere in either capital the Ministry of Agriculture opted to keep the details of the MOU quiet in the belief, it seemed, that the issue would go away. It did in a sense though the mishandling of the matter added more fuel to the fire of regional public chatter over what is felt to be the ambivalence of the Caribbean Commu-nity, its governments and its institutions on the issue of regional food security.
The truth is that up until now there have been no meaningful collective regional outcomes to the flurry of discourse between 2012 and 2014 at the Caricom level on the business of getting serious about the region’s food security nor for that matter. At the time too there seemed to be a look of intra-regional activity involving experts and the Caricom Secretariat all of which now appears to have died away. Curiously enough, during that halcyon period of region business on the issue of food security and despite the lead role that the then president Jagdeo was supposed to be playing it never seemed that Guyana was taking the process forward. One might add too that the recent Regional Heads of Government Conference certainly did not appear to pay any serious attention to the issue.
All of this is notwithstanding the fact that there are numerous arguments which suggest that Caricom is altogether capable of feeding itself whilst securing a greater share of the global food market. And what it will take to make this happen is a collective regional will, serious public, private and multilateral investment in our agricultural infrastructure, settling issues like crop insurance and on the whole getting regional financial institutions to commit wholeheartedly to agriculture.
No one says that these goals are easy to attain but then no one has been able to produce any real evidence of sustained effort on the part of Caribbean governments. The Minister of Agriculture might, in all probability, consider the challenges associated with selling what will shortly be significantly larger quantities of rice on a tough international market to be a priority matter, though taking regional food security forward whilst increasing food supplies on a global; market where we are told there is a demand for food ought to be an equality important priority.
The idea of Guyana becoming the farming hub of the region is an eminently feasible one though it assumes that the requisite infrastructure (farming technology, agricultural specialists, transportation etc) are built in to such an assumption. The idea might even encourage the acceleration of what, up until now, has been a less than satisfactory effort on the part of government and private sector alike to significantly upgrade the country’s agro processing capacity which of course means that the issue of value-added will have to be addressed somewhere else in the region.
