Readers will encounter in this issue of the Stabroek Business (front page) an account of an informal but revealing exchange between us and a small group of local agro-processors whose experiments with transforming fruit and vegetables into condiments and food flavourings began, mostly, in less than well-appointed kitchens, equipped with no more than ‘the bare necessities’.
It is by no means the most common of occurrences for heads of governments to travel to foreign capitals for the formal opening of their countries’ diplomatic missions abroad.
Just over a year ago, the World Food Programme (WFP) made the disturbing disclosure that an estimated 2.8 million people, or nearly 40 per cent of the population of the English-speaking Caribbean, had been dwelling in a condition of food insecurity.
The most recent attempt by the Caribbean to establish its food security credentials in a wider international community, where hunger and all its attendant consequences have become a serious concern would appear to have fallen, primarily to Guyana and Barbados, the former having been assigned much of the responsibility for substantive food production and the latter, for the creation of the physical infrastructure associated with the creation of the facility.
More than half a century of relatively staid diplomatic relations between Guyana and India, as two independent nations, would appear set to shift gears to an extent that goes beyond the mostly uneventful cordiality derived from a mutual acknowledgement of the centuries-old historic ties between the two countries.
The oil and gas sector, understandably, is now, by far, the overwhelmingly dominant ‘item’ on Guyana’s developmental agenda.
In a matter of a handful of months the mood of local agro-processors shifted from the condition of disappointment associated with the official turning down of a request for a subsidy to help fund their participation in last October’s Florida Trade Expo to one that was more upbeat following the decision by government to assign what we are told was a significant subsidy to the attendance of Guyanese small businesses, mostly agro-processors, we understand, at the recently concluded Barbados Agro Fest.
The surfeit of opinion to the effect that as major oil-driven state-funded projects across the sectors increase, more aggressive and more costly surges of bribery, corruption and nepotism will assail the state system is not a concern which the Irfaan Ali administration should take lightly.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley is far too astute a politician not to recognize that this month’s Agro Fest event possesses a significance that extends way beyond a ‘family event’ hosted by her country’s agriculture sector, annually, to offer Far-mers, Craft Persons and Agro Processors an opportunity to parade their goods before a more than usual audience.
The recent disclosure by CARICOM that the region has collectively reached 57% of the 25×2025 extra-regional food import reduction target would almost certainly have come as a surprise, perhaps even a shock, to the people of the Caribbean.
It will take some time and some amount of sitting down together, before the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the proposed Caribbean Energy Alliance, put forward recently by the T&T Energy Minister Stuart Young, can be properly ‘fleshed out.’
To their credit, what President Irfaan Ali and Prime Minister Mia Mottley were able to accomplish, through the fashioning of last year’s food display events in Guyana and Barbados, was the creation of a much wider regional focus on the food security bona fides of the region as a whole.
It would have come as quite a shock to many of us in the Caribbean when, around the middle of 2022, the World Bank declared that in its view the Caribbean was facing a “food crisis.”
After many of the country’s small and medium scale farmers and agro processors had been ‘caught cold’ by the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic in 2021 the government, at the beginning of 2022, had held out prospects of a better year last year.
Back in February of this year the Ministry of Agriculture issued a media release asserting that farmers and agro- processors would “benefit from lucrative markets this year.”
With viable means of existence in hinterland communities outside of the gold mining sector being historically difficult to come by, the search for alternatives has led to small-scale agriculture which, while being sufficient to satisfy largely subsistence requirements, has not, in too many cases, been expanded to lucrative commercial levels.
There can now be no mistaking the fact that in the period ahead, Guyana will play a pivotal role as a kind of compass to the region in terms of the push towards genuine integration in the economic sphere.
The warnings that the Caribbean continues to receive regarding the likelihood that climate change and some of its consequences, not least radically changing weather patterns, would bring an increasingly greater level of threat to regional food security are justifying themselves through weather patterns that grow more vicious in their intensity.
What COP 27 did, perhaps more than anything else, was to recreate the scenario that manifested itself during the earlier era of the global debate on a New International Economic Order (NIEO) when, like now, the theatre and the grandstanding that characterized the debate was ensuing against the backdrop of fixed positions couched in rhetoric that hogged the headlines whilst doing little more than underscoring divisions that never came even close to being reconciled.
President Irfaan Ali’s recent reported calls to the local private sector to capitalise on the “opportunities facilitated by the Government of Guyana” (and arising out of the outcomes of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s (GCCI) recent Business Development forum) is sound advice though what he had to say about the private sector’s seeming lack of readiness to properly engage visiting Saudi and South Korean business delegations (that the local private sector had no specific business proposals to present to either delegation) is scarcely believable.
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