Agriculture initiative

Oct 01, 2008 Editorial

October is “Agriculture Month” and the Ministry of Agriculture has announced a spate of activities that will be organised all over the country to highlight the efforts that are being made to increase and diversify agriculture in our country.

Even though it might still not be seen as a “glamour” occupation such as say, electronics, recent developments in global trade and production of basic foodstuffs have highlighted the strategic importance of this very first economic activity of mankind.

The inescapable fact of life is that we all have to eat.Guyana is uniquely poised to take advantage of this global need for secure food supplies and in doing so, improve the living standards of our people significantly.

We have an abundance of land, water and most importantly, people who have not abandoned the land as is the case in so many other countries.

But even though agriculture is still the largest segment of our economy, if we have all the resources listed above, how come our people have not been reaping the commensurate benefits and enjoying a higher standard of living?

The answer lies in the details of what has been dubbed “The Jagdeo Initiative” announced four years ago by President Jagdeo, who had the lead responsibility for agriculture in Caricom.

The Initiative sought to suggest a strategy for developing the region’s agriculture potential. But what was said about the regional underdevelopment of agriculture is also applicable to Guyana.

While the incumbent Minister of Agriculture has shown great energy and zeal in pushing development within his bailiwick, we believe his sector can produce quantum leaps if unlike the moribund actors in Caricom, he applies the insights of the initiative to our Guyanese milieu.

President Jagdeo pointed out that there were several critical elements that must be understood if agriculture is to persist as a viable economic sector.

These key elements are: agriculture is a business; agriculture is holistic; spanning the entire agri-product chain and with organic links to other productive sectors; the increasing importance of value-added food products and non-food products must be recognised; emphasis on national activities with sub-regional and regional activities included when they add value to national initiatives.

Most importantly, ten constraints to agricultural development were identified.
These were: limited financing and inadequate levels of new investments; outdated and inefficient Agricultural Health and Food Safety (AHFS) systems; inadequate research and development; a fragmented and disorganised private sector; weak land and water distribution and management systems; deficient and uncoordinated risk management measures; inadequate transportation systems, particularly for perishables; weak and non-Integrated information and intelligence systems; inadequate marketing arrangement and lack of skilled and quality human resources.

We suggest that by the end of Agriculture Month, the Minister convenes a meeting of all key stakeholders that operate in the agricultural sector within Guyana so as to apply the initiative to our specific opportunities and needs.

Take for example the observation that “agriculture is a business”. Most of our farmers have holdings that are five acres or less and operate their farms very inefficiently. Farmer organisations along the lines of the RPA ought to be resuscitated to bring their constituents up to speed on how to run their operations “as a business”.

The imminent start-up of the Skeldon Sugar Factory (while unfortunate, glitches are a fact of life in any operation) will allow the co-generation of cheap, clean and reliable electrical power.

Rather than pumping it into the national grid, maybe it ought to be confined to agro-processing industries that can be encouraged to start up in Berbice.

Spoilage of perishables is the bane of most agricultural produce and canning and/or flash freezing of the latter are only two of the operations that can be facilitated.

Unlike what most people believe, Guyana does not have a cash problem: we have an intermediation problem. Because of excess liquidity, the Bank of Guyana is “sterilising” some $60 billion of funds from commercial banks in the form of Treasury Bills.

Surely, at the national conference on agriculture plans and projects from entrepreneurs and farmers can be matched to bankers with the government overseeing the intermediation of the necessary funding and so on, with the other constraints that should each have a lead person, a la Caricom, who is responsible for removing them. Let’s have an Agriculture decade.

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Agriculture initiative

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