As Guyana looks on ruefully at the still ongoing cleanup and rebuilding operations arising out of Hurricane Beryl and its consequences elsewhere in the Caribbean, the country’s Ministry of Agriculture has announced the undertaking of a U$US 45 million investment in the strengthening of the its resistance capacity against the backdrop of what is now an enhanced obligation to consolidate the country’s food production capabilities.
Even as combined public/private sector effort was ongoing to support the now further weakened food security bona fides in countries in the region possessed of fragile credentials in the first place, Guyana’s Senior Minister in the Office of the President with responsibility for Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh was signing off on a US$45 million agreement with the World Bank, for the Coastal Adaptation and Resilience (CARes) project, according to a release from the Department of Public Information (DPI).
Evidence of the timeliness of the undertaking could hardly have been more pointed even as the signing of the Agreement coincided with efforts in the wider Caribbean to begin to repair the devastation wreaked in the agriculture sector and elsewhere in the region where Beryl’s rampage has not only wiped out farms, the restoration of which will involve millions of dollars in investments by both the public and private sectors, but will also, for periods of time than cannot be determined at this stage, leave the affected countries highly dependent in external food aid.
If no such threat applies to Guyana at this stage the country’s agriculture sector is no stranger to floods that decimate large swathes of farmlands creating immediate-term shortages and inflicting heavy repairs and restoration costs on both private farmers and the state.
The DPI release says that the CARes project “marks the latest and the second largest investment to date being financed through the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF)… under a Guyana-Norway partnership linked to the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) which Guyana had originally earned more than US$220 million for its forest climate services.”
The coincidence between the materialization of Hurricane Beryl and the availability of funding under the CARes project, which will see the rehabilitation or complete replacement of more than 45 kokers/sluices across Guyana, underscores the virtues of employing a multilateral approach to climate change mitigation.
The intervention, the DPI release says, will “increase Guyana’s resilience and adaptive capacity to prevent, manage and mitigate flooding across its coastal regions, safeguarding lives and livelihoods.”
