The prevailing weather patterns in Trinidad and Tobago are giving some of the country’s farmers what one might call the customary Guyana experience of what the media in the twin-island Republic reports as extensive crop destruction due to what would appear to be heavier than usual levels of the year-end rainfall.
A report in the Friday November 11 edition of the Trinidad Guardian details the destruction of “hundreds of fields of fresh produce” on account of flooding during the accustomed rainy season, a circumstance which, the farmers are already warning, will have a direct impact on food prices in the twin-island Republic. The Trini farmers, however, have reportedly gone militant, some of them reportedly threatening to walk away from their farms until the dry season materialises, their argument being, according to the Guardian report that “it makes no sense to continue to suffer losses due to… flood damage.” Guyanese farmers can entirely appreciate both the plight and the mood of their Trinidadian counterparts, victims as they have long been of devastating seasonal deluges, wreaking havoc with crops and livestock and sending food prices into temporary tailspins.
Some of the heaviest losses in Guyana occur in the rice industry, one of the agriculture sector’s major export money earners while cattle farmers ‘soak up’ their own millions of dollars in losses due to flooded pastures and attendant loss of livestock to drowning. Guyana, over the years, has now grown accustomed to having to mitigate the impact of seasonal rainfall by paying compensation to affected farmers. That said there is usually little that can be done to curb the knock-on effects of flooding and attendant crop losses on food prices. The accustomed routine here is for farmers to ‘soak up’ their losses and for government to take limited compensatory action which, usually, does not come even close to covering the full extent of the losses suffered by the farmers.
Here in Guyana, if the weather-related portents are actualised, the situation in the period ahead is unlikely to be any better this year. At the beginning of November the Ministry of Agriculture was forecasting “wetter than usual rainfall conditions across all regions of Guyana for the months of November 2022 to January 2023 which it says “will be augmented by persistent La Nina conditions during the season… with rainfall “expected to increase considerably from mid-November and continue at least to January, 2023.”
A concern that arises here is whether or not another bout of heavy seasonal rainfall in Guyana is not likely to impact the timing for the full-fledged launch of a Regional Food Security Terminal to serve the Caribbean in circumstances of emergency and whether, in the longer term, weather patterns might even impact on the region’s commitment to reducing its extra regional food imports by 25% by 2025.
