By: Kimberly Ramkhalawan
May 20, 2022
Regional heads met in Guyana to launch the inaugural Agriculture and Investment Forum, keeping true to promises made earlier this year to host the forum targeted at tackling the region’s food crisis post pandemic.
The event looks at bringing together the private sector, along with farmers, policy makers along with Caribbean leaders and other stakeholders in the agriculture sector, partnering all with the aim of reducing the region’s food import bill, while working together to bridge supply chains locally, and expand food and livestock production.
Opening the event, Master of Ceremonies and media company executive, Alex Graham described it as the Caribbean family making a giant leap together forward, after its ancestors first settled in the region, toiling its soil to ensure the world had its supply of sugar, coffee, coconut and other food resources, feeding ourselves and the others, something Graham said in local parlance, “is time the region catch we self to do it again”.
The forum focuses on goals outlined by CARICOM as part of its plan for reducing food import bill by 25 percent by 2025.
CARICOM Secretary General, Dr Carla Barnett in her opening remarks says the ‘objective requires rebooting of the agriculture sector to improve production and boost intra-regional trade, not just a concept but an urgent necessity as a statement by heads of government which demonstrates the time for action is now’.
Citing that the region has decided to undertake this task at a time of great global uncertainty outside of the pandemic, Dr Barnett says recent increased prices for food, fuel and other basic goods due to the war in Ukraine and long lasting supply chain disruption, has added to the stresses of vulnerable people within the Caribbean’s populations, which have also resulted in increased cost in doing business, while it also puts additional pressures on Governments’ budgets .
Brainchild of the event Guyana’s President Dr Irfaan Ali who is also host of the agro investment forum, says while the heads might be at the front line of trade sometimes, the event sends ‘a strong singular message that is together we are ready to move forward in every aspect of the food production system’.
Dr Ali says the forum looks to tackle ‘production to trade to relations, to issues of markets to barriers, transport and logistics is on the table’, while they ‘recognize that if these issues cannot be addressed in a collective multifaceted manner then it will not be able to bring the long-term solutions that are so critically required’.
For this reason, President Ali stressed the importance of the private sector’s being at the center of the expo, including farmers. Having seen and exposed to the pressures the poultry sector is already facing, not to mention the possible shortage of baby milk formula, President Ali vowed to ensure the region would not be as vulnerable in the coming years, as ‘lessons learnt in the vaccination war taught the region, that its position in the line is definitely not in front’. Similar, the challenge for CARICOM states is not only the rise in prices but supply. He said lessons learnt Global production he says will only be maintained just enough for consumption investments in aquaculture, wheat research, production and infrastructure, such as farm to market roads, along with partnerships with other regional states.
Ali says his government was already in collaboration with the private sector and building consortium with farmers and young people and adding production through high value items, having invested more than GY$100M in brackish water shrimp production, which increased from 250,000 kilograms to 1.2M Kgs, while so far GY$651M has been allocated for the corn and soya project supporting the consortium in reaching this start.
Ali says his government has embarked on several development research breeding programmes for indigenous fresh water fish species, as well as research on varieties of wheat that can be planted in Guyana to meet its national needs and to further expand to regional supply.
Meanwhile, in terms of regional collaboration, Ali spoke of the plans to launch a food terminal in Barbados with one thousand black belly sheep to boost its livestock production where they have already agreed to a share-housing initiative which will see the setting up of 50 share houses in Barbados. Other opportunities included looking at marine cage technology for tilapia and other breeds of fish as well as fertiliser production stemming from its gas to energy project which fits into its plans to reduce the cost of energy by fifty percent as an incentive to encourage agro-processing.
He spoke also of tapping into the global hemp market with the US market projected to be at US$1B by 2028, while it has also began to table legislation to regulate the hemp industry locally in recent days.
Ali says the region could not afford to lose this momentum as billions of dollars could be saved through products that could be manufactured locally and spoke to his fellow regional heads to look at areas in which they could its overarching strategies could assist in boosting the agro sector. He suggested that Caribbean governments look at streamlining procedures for exports and imports, commitments to the removal of barriers, developing a pre-clearance system for export of goods to reduce bureaucracy and spoilage, standardization of certification process, technical support in developing proposals for farmers, incentivize agricultural lands for financial institutions, greater involvement of youth and women in production, privatization with government of regional cargo logistics as just some of the areas government policies could aid the growth of the sector.
Meanwhile Mia Amor Mottley says while they await the global crisis report to be released shortly from the UN on areas such as food, energy and finance, with an expectation with what the world currently faces will be even more challenging, she says as a region they have a responsibility to be preemptive in action for its people.
She recalled in 2018 other CARICOM meetings where she questioned why they were not resuscitating the Jagdeo initiative, set themselves the simple target of reducing food imports regionally by 25 percent by 2025, little did she know how apt that would be challenging with it being moved up to 50 percent by 2025 targets met.
Mottley says the region does not have the luxury to ignore the challenges ahead. She added that as a region we did not have a taste for our own food, while visitors to our shores were not partaking of our brands of juices and beverages. Mottley says this ‘require the support of distributors and those involved in retail trade, restaurants and hotels as she drew attention to how juices are served in a tin after being imported from other parts of the world, something she described as being ‘offensive to an independent Caribbean nation’.
The Barbados PM added that there was a need to remove international trade barriers that she says has strangled the region in order to accelerate the agro processing sector. She says the expectation that are farmers are to produce, must be one all year round and not only in crisis. Mottley spoke to ‘the hypocrisy of a world that continues to allow the most powerful countries to subsidise domestic agriculture while the rest of us have to literally play by rules that do not allow us to support our famers when they most need it’.
Meanwhile, she defended her country’s decision to host UNCTAD earlier this year as having to ‘bring a chair to the table where it has been arguing for the last thirty years for special and differential treatment since the region has no capacity to distort global trade in goods and services’. Coming from her World Trade Organisation lecture in recent weeks, the Barbados Prime Minister says it was there she was reminded that her country’s own production had fallen by 20 % since the establishment of the WTO. To this she says we cannot operate under these circumstances and desires to host UNCTAD was to carry the voice that we need policy space to protect our domestic food production and regional production. Citing the possible threat of shipments from Miami unable to come in for several weeks puts small island developing states at a vulnerable position.
As to what is needed to move forward, Mottley returned to food security in the context of the CSME, meeting the requirements regionally as well as internationally in food exports. Not forgetting her position in the one food she called for sustainable agriculture processes such as affordable inputs, resolving groundwater crisis and droughts which affects farmers, insurance to assist farmers whose crops are destroyed by bad weather and while technical support is provided in the fight against praedial larceny.
The forum will continue this weekend at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre in Georgetown, Guyana, and will see some 300 exhibitors, with panel discussions among agriculture stakeholders spanning the region.