Up to about three years ago, there had been a great deal of intra-regional chatter about the need for the Caribbean Community (Caricom) to move to significantly reduce the extent of its spending on extra-regional food imports and focus more policy attention and resources on increasing agricultural production. The object of this was not only in relation to our own consumption, but also as a means taking advantage of the extra-regional market in circumstances where global food shortages appeared to be looming large. Arriving at a common position on food imports and on the need to devise strategies to enable greater reliance on food produced here in the Caribbean had, even earlier, been the subject of discourse at the level of regional Heads. Then President Jagdeo served as the lead advocate in the matter of a regional food policy, Guyana having long been recognized as the Caricom member country with by far the largest agricultural base and with the land mass that would lend real impetus to the idea of regional food security.
This was the backdrop against which the then Trinidad and Tobago Food Production Minister Devant Maraj visited Guyana in 2012 and held talks with local officials, including former Agriculture Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy. The discussions revolved around a possible arrangement under which Trinidadian investors would be allocated large tracts of land for the creation of mega farms, the produce from which would be shipped to the twin-island republic for processing and marketing in the region and abroad. This may have been a bilateral initiative but the whole idea was that it should serve as a sort of template for a broader, more aggressive regional focus on food security.
In both Georgetown and Port of Spain there appeared to be a some measure of interest (at the level of the two governments) in taking the project forward. Apart from the pointed public focus on a proposed ‘land for farming’ MOU between the two countries, the Maraj visit was followed by a subsequent visit to Guyana by the then Trinidad and Tobago Finance Minister Larry Howai. Afterwards, in his 2013 budget presentation Howai told the T&T National Assembly that an agreement had been reached between the two countries under which 10,000 acres of land would become available in Berbice for the creation of mega farms and that an additional 90,000 acres of land would have been made available to farmers in Trinidad and Tobago.
All of this, as it turned out, was not much more than waffle since the mega farms idea appeared to be gaining little traction at the level of the respective populations and more specifically the respective farming communities. In Port of Spain, at least one farming group frowned openly on the idea, asserting that there was more than sufficient land in Trinidad and Tobago to allow for local investment in mega farms, and that there was no need to resort to shifting T&T investor dollars to Guyana. Here in Guyana the dissenting voices may have been more muted, though they did not fail to make the point that the intended bilateral arrangement sought to defer to the Trini investors as far as the allocation of the choice of local farmlands was concerned.
On both sides, there was no point at which it ever seemed likely that farmers in either Guyana or Trinidad and Tobago were likely to buy into the idea. This was not surprising. The history of Caricom discourse on regional food security idea had always appeared to have been embraced with varying levels of enthusiasm at individual country level. One might have thought, for example, that since the Guyana/Trinidad and Tobago bilateral was envisaged as an initiative that would go some way towards more holistic focus on regional food security, that there would have been some measure of highly visible Caricom-wide support for the initiative. That never happened. By and large the remaining member states kept their distance from the project. Once the project failed to gain wider traction amongst the farming communities both here and in Trinidad and Tobago the trail simply went cold.
Since then and up until last week’s altogether unsurprising announcement by Agriculture Minister Noel Holder that the MOU had now expired, we had heard little if anything about the arrangement. What Minister Holder was quoted as saying was that “a Memorandum of Understanding is only valid for one year, and in that one year, certain things have to be done on both sides. In that one year, Trinidad apparently expressed no further interest.”
That may well be so, but surely there is nothing to say that the idea of Trinidad and Tobago private sector investment in mega farms in Guyana could not have been persisted with anyway, assuming, of course, that it was considered to be as pivotal to the broader effort to maximize regional food security as it had been made out to be.
All of this, surely, is reflective of a casualness that is more than deserving of much deeper enquiry when consideration is given to what is at stake. While the intra-regional discourse of the cost of food imports and the fashioning of policies to address high food prices in the Caribbean appeared to have waned somewhat in the past year or two, food import costs, which had reportedly climbed to around US$4 billion a few years ago, remain a major issue. What it means is that the countries in the region whose economies depend much more on tourism and industry than on agriculture are still not fully committed to the idea of creating a firm platform for regional food security.
What the quiet abandonment of the so-called mega-farms MOU represents is a manifestation of the persistent failure of the Caribbean Community to develop a serious collective focus on issues of significant intra-regional import, the individual preoccupation with national interest, real or perceived, invariably outdoing any real collective will to derive collective benefit. What we have lost in this instance is much more than the envisaged outcomes of the mega-farms MOU. What has transpired is yet another cycle of elaborate and costly intra-regional discourse on an issue of critical importance to the well-being of the people of the Caribbean, in circumstances where the available evidence would appear to suggest that the regional agenda is not currently as focused on intra-regional food security as it ought to be. Contextually, that ought to be a matter of much concern to Caricom Heads and to the community as a whole.
