The Agriculture Investment Forum

Jun 11, 2008 Editorial

The two-day “CARICOM Agriculture Investment Forum” ended last Sunday and the CARICOM Secretariat has informed us that some “twenty-five projects ranging from food production to ethanol production were presented to investors”.

However, when one examines the fine print it does not appear that the Forum lived up to its billing.
Based on the results of the FAO’s summit on food that were discussed in yesterday’s editorial we ought not to be surprised. The bottom line is that the millions of bureaucrats across the globe that staff the hundreds of governmental organisations, NGO’s, are an industry unto themselves.

They organise meetings, summits, forums and get-togethers that serve mainly to justify their existence by pushing papers and adding to the crisis of global warming through the production of hot air.

Based on what we had been led to believe, it appears that, as the Americans would say, “we were had”. It was reported at the beginning of the Forum that “bankers and financiers pointed out that Government guarantees, crop insurance, export credit and tax and other concessions, and the removal of cross-border barriers to trade in agriculture were factors they considered important when making investments in agriculture.

Adequate infrastructure and research were also factors that financiers said were important in alleviating the challenges associated with funding projects in the sector.” The question is why should these constraints be only brought up at a Forum that was supposed to be focused on linking money with concrete projects.

What were the CARICOM bureaucrats doing before the Forum was convened? Hadn’t the Jagdeo Initiative already identified ten binding constraints to agriculture in the region? Wasn’t financing one of those constraints?

We are told that this Agriculture Investment Forum was a follow-up to the “Agriculture Donor Conference held in Trinidad and Tobago last year…and…was geared at networking and creating linkages with stakeholders in the regional agriculture sector.”

Is this the best that the US$10 million in pledges from the region at that Conference could produce: “networking and linkages”? In the build-up to the Forum we were promised that the goal was immediate investment in agriculture or at minimum some serious commitment by the invited “stakeholders”.

Our President had promised tax concessions to investors to demonstrate Guyana’s seriousness and had declared that “It’s the projects that matter and not the chat”. Most of what we got was fat chat.
The presentation at the Forum that took the cake on chat was the one by Senator Arnold Piggott, Minister of Agriculture, Land and Marine Resources of Trinidad and Tobago.

He spoke of his country’s plans to create some seventeen “mega-farms” which had been announced even as President Jagdeo and our Minister of Agriculture were beating the bush as it were to secure financing for agriculture in our country, given our comparative advantage in that area.

Our Minister of Agriculture had got in contact immediately with the Government of Trinidad and Tobago to highlight the need for collaboration and the fact that Guyana was making agricultural land available to the Caribbean Community at a very nominal cost.

As best as we know, we have never heard from the Trinidadians and yet the Honourable Mr Piggott could announce with great aplomb that he “intended to submit his country’s farm concept template to the Community so that duplication of regional efforts in food production could be avoided.”

So Guyana is now being told that it cannot duplicate Trinidad’s efforts!

We will return to the Forum in subsequent editorials but suffice it to say at this juncture that we in Guyana will have to accept that we cannot depend on CARICOM or any CARICOM Government to assist us in developing our agricultural potential. What can we expect when CARICOM’s point-man on the forum, Mr. Moss-Solomon, could glibly announce, “Agriculture holds so much potential; we cannot ask governments alone to bear the burden.”

What does “the burden of potential” mean? Why did not the CARICOM Secretariat organise a Forum that could deliver more concrete results given its experience of over thirty years with the facts of our developmental needs?

Mr Moss-Solomon’s passive suggestion that the Forum “may morph into an annual event” is indicative of the lack of vision and commitment to the development of agriculture in Guyana.

We sincerely hope that any future Forum on Agriculture Investment is not a repetition of the first.

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