By making public the fact that it has now moved the country’s agriculture sector to the top of its agenda (ahead of tourism) in terms of targeting foreign investment for the country, the Jamaica Promotions Corporation (JAMPRO), the country’s national investment and export promotion agency, has paraded its credentials for leading rather than following, insofar as setting an agenda for the country’s foreign investment pursuits in the period ahead is concerned. That, frankly, is not surprising. JAMPRO, since its creation in 1988, has been the standout service and product promotion/marketing entity in the Caribbean, its successes winning Jamaica an enviable reputation for the aggressive and frankly, outstanding promotion of the country’s goods and services abroad, notably in major international markets. It is doubtful whether too many (if any, at all) other state-run service or product promotion agency in the region is equipped with that level of clout.
JAMPRO’s assessment of Jamaica’s investment priorities in the period ahead, sees agriculture leap-frogging tourism – the long-standing ‘boss’ of Jamaica’s economy – in the pecking order of investment priorities. If the decision to place investment in agriculture ahead of tourism at this juncture may come as a surprise to some, it points to JAMPRO’s confidence in its ability to make an informed assessment of what the country’s investment priorities ought to be at any point in time and to give strategic direction to the dispersing of Jamaica’s investment-garnering effort.
The rationale that led JAMPRO to name agriculture as its ‘pick’ for focused foreign investment in the immediate term is provided in a pronouncement by the agency’s President, Diane Edwards, that “If international trade starts to shut down, then we have to eat what we grow, and that has created greater urgency for us to leverage our idle lands.” That judgement, unmistakably, takes account of a mindfulness that a COVID-19 food security setback could yet surface in the period ahead. Its insightfulness is noteworthy. What JAMPRO is seeking to do here is to ensure that its food security circumstance is, as far as possible, decoupled from the milestone of a US$5 billion regional food import bill, of which Jamaica reportedly pays one fifth.
The focus of JAMPRO’s thinking on fashioning strategic partnerships with foreign companies is to establish agribusiness enterprises in Jamaica, creating room for local companies prepared to invest in agricultural and food-manufacturing businesses and in effect helping to push the level of food imports down. It will be recalled that a roughly similar bilateral initiative between Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago (to create a private sector-driven joint venture mega farms initiative) as far back as 2008 eventually ‘crashed and burned’ largely on account of the inexplicable notion that exists in our part of the world that government ministers (frequently with no substantive knowledge of the issues at hand or any inclination to put in the work to understand those issues) are ideally positioned to ‘front’ such initiatives. In truth, that project had a distinctly ‘half-cooked’ appearance about it and failed distinctly to gain any traction with farmers in either Guyana or T&T.
Government Ministries (and Ministers) with their controlling instincts and constricting procedures and protocols can and have, frequently, been the graveyard where perfectly worthwhile initiatives – the aforementioned Guyana-T&T initiative being an example – have been interred. Mind you, it is not a matter of JAMPRO being free of ministerial oversight. The entity works well, it seems, because ministerial oversight has not been burdensome on its efficiency. JAMPRO has done well, it seems, not because of the latitude it enjoys to make important strategic decisions in the confidence that these are qualitatively sound enough to win the unqualified approval of government. Here in Guyana Ministers frequently insist on their ‘two pennies’ worth of input so that important initiatives on those kinds of issues are shaped to varying degrees by ‘the Minister’s perspective’ However well-merited or otherwise those initiative might be.
Leaving JAMPRO aside, we in the Caribbean have arrived at a critical fork in our developmental road. Prevarication and palavering over issues that have to do with development in one sector or another have been the bane of our existence. Important projects have languished on the drawing board across governments in some territories, again including Guyana, the issue of regional food security being one of those. Again in the particular instance of Guyana, attempts at reaching ambitious agreements with overseas investors along the JAMPRO lines will become more feasible (given the country’s size and potential crop volume advantage) only if our politically burdened decision-making culture changes. Too many important issues are placed in the hands of state officials who have become expert in shuffling issues to the back burner or disappearing them down some other bureaucratic black hole.
Take the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC), whose responsibility, these past thirty five years, has been to provide “marketing services to stakeholders (farmers, agro-processors, exporters) of the non-traditional agricultural sector,” One might ask whether an agency so ideally positioned to simultaneously support both domestic and external product promotion could not as well be suitably expanded to play a role in helping to attract foreign investment in those same sectors, not least agro-processing. Here, the point should be made that across a succession of governments in Guyana the ill-defined theory of economic diplomacy has failed to manifest itself in practice, leaving a gaping hole in our foreign investment and product-marketing infrastructure.
Whether, of course, the GMC can effectively perform such a critical clutch of responsibilities whilst being overseen by a bureaucratically muscle-bound Ministry of Agriculture is debatable. Frankly, the ‘custodial’ circumstance in which agencies like the GMC (the Small Business Bureau is another example of this) find themselves hobbled, restricts their ability to realize the mandates that have been set them. Where there is capable and astute leadership, knowledgeable functionaries and a clear understanding of the roles of these institutions, further layers of bureaucratic oversight such as imposing state-appointed Boards often hinder rather than help.
If there is something to be said for the role that the GMC, for example, plays in providing modest domestic markets for farmers and agro-processors and executing some services relating to the export of agricultural commodities, the reality is that it is not anywhere near being fully equipped to perform these functions as effectively as it perhaps can for some of the aforementioned reasons.
To return to JAMPRO, its operating model is one from which our state-run agencies can learn a great deal. JAMPRO works, it seems, because there is sufficient political confidence in its accomplishments which sometimes does not appear to be the case with some of the so-called semi-autonomous state-run agencies in Guyana where, invariably, there is a political minder peering over the entity’s shoulder.
