At the opening of a Farm-to-Market Road in Parika, East Bank Essequibo, last week, President David Granger asserted that Guyana was the answer to Caricom food security and confided, “Caribbean leaders are looking at Guyana as the new horizon for agricultural development.” He elaborated on his encouragement for the Caribbean to invest capital in Guyana’s vast agricultural potential. It would appear that the (agricultural) wheel is continually being reinvented in the Caribbean.
A reminder might be appropriate at this time. Caricom had launched its Regional Transformation Programme for Agriculture (RTPA) in 1996, because it was recognised from the launching of the organisation the Region was importing too much food. The “colonial” mentality had persisted after independence. Yet even though hundreds of meetings were held at all different levels since 1973 and dozens of papers produced, the food bill was undiminished by 2002 when President Bharrat Jagdeo placed the Initiative on agriculture that bears his name.
Then the Lead Head responsible for agriculture, Jagdeo declared, “. . .at this stage, we need a policy and strategy which will allow us to decide on what sort of institutions and mechanisms are needed to reposition agriculture.” In 2003, he asked Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to assist in the development of a framework for a regional agricultural repositioning strategy. In 2004, the Heads of Government endorsed the proposal, which contained the Initiative’s vision, scope, focus and process. By 2005, it declared, if every country did their bit, agriculture would: (“make substantial contributions to economic development and economic, social and environmental sustainability; (have a transparent regulatory framework at national and regional levels that promotes, attracts and facilitates capital and investments; have significantly transformed its processes and products and stimulates innovation and entrepreneurship; and (enable the Region to achieve an acceptable and stable level of food security”.
The Initiative identified 10 constraints and responsibilities that had been allocated for addressing those constraints. The constraints, with the territory’s Minister of Agriculture responsible for removing them were : 1) Limited financing and inadequate new investments – Barbados/CDB; 2) Outdated/inefficient agricultural health & food safety (AHFS) systems – Trinidad & Tobago/ Caricom Secretariat; 3) Inadequate research and development – St Lucia/CARDI; 4) Fragmented and disorganised Private Sector – St Vincent; 5) Inefficient land & water distribution & management systems – Guyana; 6) Deficient and uncoordinated risk management measures – Antigua/Barbuda; 7) Inadequate transportation (especially for perishables) – St Kitts and Nevis; 8&9) Weak and non-integrated information/intelligence systems and weak linkages/participation in markets – Jamaica; 10) Lack of skilled human resources – Dominica. The Initiative was supposed to have been consummated by 2015.
Back in 2008 at the Convention Centre at Liliendaal, there was a “Regional Agriculture Investment Forum”, that promised great undertakings. In 2009, there was another meet, “The Public/Private Sector Consultation on Agri-Business in the Caribbean”. With hundreds of “stakeholders” – bankers, Ministers, Heads of State, businessmen, etc. Twenty-five projects – deemed “concrete” – had been identified. Guyana had offered 120,000 acres of land at a nominal lease for agricultural development. Yet in 2008, T&T independently launched 18 mega farms and pumped millions of dollars into them, without any reference to the Jagdeo Initiative. By 2015, the T&T Government had to acknowledge the mega farms as failures.
There were subsequently two multilateral efforts of Caribbean collaboration on agriculture. In 2013, the Governments of Guyana and T&T announced the latter would be granted 10,000 acres of land in the former’s intermediate savannahs and would finance the production of agricultural products that would be exported to its domestic market. This initiative died on the vine. In the same year, a private Barbadian operation, Santa Fe launched a mega farm in the Rupununi starting with the cultivation of dry land rice. Today, the mega farm has taken root.
At the 2008 forum, Jagdeo had pointed out “it’s the projects that matter, not the chat”. It would appear that Caricom Governments can only chat and Guyana should press ahead with private capital.
