The fact that this year’s Caribbean Week of Agriculture, which is being held from October 7-11 is being staged a mere handful of weeks after Hurricane Beryl had devastated the agriculture sector in several countries in the region, is surely the issue that ought to be at the core of the contemplations and outcomes derived from this event.
The organizers of the programme for the CWA event, one assumes, are altogether aware of the fact that any programme that neglects to tackle, front and centre, Beryl’s rampage and what we can do to spare ourselves at least some of the consequences of another of the region’s annual weather upheavals is unlikely to find favour with astute analysts.
Against the backdrop of the various recent initiatives intended to strengthen currently limited relations between the Caribbean and Africa, the Governments of Trinidad and Tobago and Ghana have signed an agreement for the Reciprocal Promotion and Protection of Investments (ARPPI), a development that can be regarded as an ‘opening salvo’ in what, going forward, is envisaged as a broader swathe of bilateral and multilateral relations between Africa and the Caribbean.
While much of the reportage on the current ‘crime spree’ that has gripped CARICOM member country, Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), has focused on its impact on the country’s business community, some analysts are insisting that a thought be spared for the ‘average Joe /Josephine’ whose only wish is to live in a society where the extent of his/her worry is confined to living in a well-ordered environment.
It is not commonplace for routine visits to Guyana by trade delegations from sister CARICOM countries to be led by the Prime Minister of the visiting country.
Local small business owners and aspirants hoping to access state support for the setting up or expanding of existing entrepreneurial ventures are of the view that the recent official disclosure that the state-run Small Business Bureau has established a ‘window’ (a Resource Centre) through which small business owners and, presumably, prospective owners, can benefit from somewhere they can go to and get readily available information that can assist them with business growth issues, should not become the victim of yet another tier of bureaucratic clutter.
The seemingly entrenched ‘divide’ between North and South that manifests itself, mostly, in a rich/poor divide and the failed efforts that have been made over decades by the South to narrow the gap, has once again been shoved to the front burner by Hurricane Beryl, more accurately, by the physical state in which the hurricane left large swathes of the region.
Beryl provides more reason for the region to hear from the food security ‘Lead Heads’
If in the light of recent events the Stabroek Business has decided to take yet another tilt at the issue of regional food security that is because we could not think of another more suitable issue to address in the wake of the intrusion of Hurricane Beryl and the further negative impact that it has had on food security in some territories even before she had made her rumbustious presence felt.
Across political administrations in Guyana there have been persistent concerns about the physical conditions that obtain at our municipal markets which, to say the least, have from ‘way back’, been downright deplorable.
Guyana’s reputation as ‘the food basket of the Caribbean’ has never, for a moment, been called into question, the consistently enduring performance of our agriculture sector making the point that not only do we produce sufficient to feed ourselves (and this bears no relation to high food prices in our municipal markets) but also to help ‘cover’ for the food deficit that obtains elsewhere in the region.
In this issue of the Stabroek Business we reported that one of the pursuits of the Guyana National Bureau of Standards (GNBS) is the monitoring of certain types of imports into Guyana to ensure that these are of the necessary standard and that they do not, in any way, compromise the overall purpose of their intended use.
As is not infrequently inclined to happen in the Caribbean, we find ourselves – sometimes on account of no more than a lack of focus – becoming distracted on issues that are of varying degrees of importance either to individual member countries or to the region, as a whole.
It is a matter of considerable irony that even as a number of Caribbean/CARICOM countries remain engrossed in the process of picking up the proverbial pieces from the destructive assault visited upon them by Hurricane Beryl, and when such limited agricultural sectors as exist in some of the smaller territories in the region would have been swept away by the onslaught, the Caribbean, at least up to this time, has said nothing about the lessons learnt from Beryl’s tantrums for redesigning strategies that ensure its food security bona fides can at least hold its own, to some extent, when weather rampages occur.
Even as Hurricane Beryl declared its destructive intentions early in what had, for weeks, been projected as a destabilizing hurricane season for the Caribbean, the World Food Programme (WFP), USA had declared its preparedness to support the global body’s emergency response efforts in pursuit of what it seemingly anticipated would have added significantly to the pre-existing food security challenges that have already been impacting on the region.
In a matter of a handful of days we – Guyana, that is – will find ourselves playing host to a business forum (CIF 2024) the significance of which transcends the geographic limitations of our country, including the boundaries of our own domestic ambitions and aspirations, extending first into the wider geographic space that we refer to as the Caribbean Community and beyond that, to much of the rest of the international community, and that recent and exalted recognition of the geographic space known as Guyana, arrived with a blinding speed and has yet to register, in all probability, in the remoter regions of our country.
Back in April last, news broke that Guyana, for reasons that had to do, largely, with the country’s access to large tracts of arable land, was to be the location of a regional food security terminal.
Guyana is not one of those ‘hot spots’ – so to speak – among the territories in which matches of the 2024 Cricket World Cup (CWC) will be played where serious security-related occurrences are expected to mar the events themselves, or create a discomfiting atmosphere, particularly for visitors to the country who will arrive here to see the games.
The Stabroek Business has lost count of the number of occasions on which our various requests for updates on the promised creation of a Regional Food Terminal have been completely ignored by the ‘competent authorities,’ that is to say, the two ‘lead Heads’ on what, arguably, is the region’s most important collective assignment at this time.
On January 5 this year, a ‘News Agency’ report from the Ministry of Agriculture asserted that during the course of 2023, 130 new agro-processed products had been launched and that in the same year, 54 “new Guyana Shop Corners” had been established.
The fact that, notwithstanding the persistent ‘nudging’ by this newspaper, we have not heard ‘a peep’ out of the two ‘lead Heads’ nor their designated ‘minder ministers’ holding the respective relevant portfolios, has moved the matter of the regional Food Security Terminal into the realm of puzzlement and beyond that, has given rise to the speculation as to whether, in terms of the execution of what had been touted as a critical assignment for the region, and especially for the more vulnerable countries in the Community, something might not have ‘gone wrong’.
Up to this point in time, the ‘average Joe’ in the Caribbean is probably ‘none the wiser’ as to the real reason(s) behind the unexpected tumult within the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) triggered by what had been described as the suspension of the St.
