Guyana was among 38 countries that achieved the first Millennium Development Goal ahead of the 2015 deadline – to halve the percentage of persons in the country who were hungry compared to baseline figures from 1990. This was more than gratifying.
That we were only one of 18 countries to have achieved the more stringent World Food Summit goal set in 1996, to halve the number of undernourished persons by 2012, was astounding for a country that had been plunged to the level of sub-Saharan Africa by the PNC by 1992, when the PPP/C took office.
What our experience has demonstrated is that good intentions in this area is simply not good enough. The PNC, in its 1972-1976 five-year plan, had explicitly stated its goals were to “Feed, clothe and house” the nation by the end of the plan. But the policies that it undertook proved to be so disastrous that thousands ended up hungry and contracting “white mouth” as a visible sign of rampant malnutrition.
We can look at those plans as an object lesson, as “what not to do” if we are to achieve the new “Zero Hunger Challenge” launched by the UN afterwards, which is now being placed once again on the CariCom agenda. The first lesson is that farmers must be given incentives to remain on the land. Appeals to “patriotism” will not suffice.
One of the pillars of Guyanese food security has been the rice industry, since that grain is our main staple by far. Due to the knowledge of wet rice cultivation brought over from their native North India by the post-1838 indentured labourers, Guyana moved from being an importer of rice from Myanmar (then “Burma”) to an exporter at the beginning of the 20th century.
The incentive was the profits gleaned by the farmers, which enabling them to claw their way up the economic ladder. The PNC’s plan was supposedly “rational” – on paper. It legislated the purchase of all paddy and rice from the farmers, invested initially in large scale milling facilities, and controlled all exports. The profits were supposed to be ploughed back into the economy to fund the thrust into manufacture, so that the country could climb up the value-added staircase.
The fatal flaw was that the Government and its planners were either too greedy or they overestimated the patriotism of the farmers. Or they were vindictive. Their prices to the farmers were so low that, based on the foreign sale price, there was an implicit tax on the rice industry of over 100%. The result, not surprisingly, was that farmers left the industry in droves, and those that remained did so because there were no alternative sources of employment.
Just as unsurprisingly, when the PPP Government reversed the policies of the PNC and also pumped money into agricultural infrastructure such as drainage and irrigation, production escalated to the present record-breaking 600,000+ tonnes per annum. The same policy must be followed in all the other areas of food production.
Guyana’s comparative advantage has always been in its vast areas of available farmland. When sugar was king back in the colonial days, its cultivation received the choicest land and irrigation/drainage priorities. Especially in Demerara, the policy of using these prime agricultural lands for housing now that sugar production has been curtailed must be rationalised. These lands should be put into alternative crops to satisfy both local and foreign demand for “food security”.
We are not advocating that the Government replicate or even imitate the PNC’s policies to ban foodstuff because it constitutes a “drain on foreign reserves”. People must be free to eat what they choose, but we cannot be oblivious that the choice between foods which may have the same nutritional value is socially constructed. We can definitely do more to encourage our farmers to cultivate “foreign” foods, and our people to eat and buy more local produce.
The key to success against hunger, we repeat, is: incentives, incentives, incentives – to farmers.
