Give local farmers the first option

Dec 01, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Charity begins at home. There are a great many Guyanese at home searching for investable proposals. They deserve first call on investments.
Guyana has taken its agricultural investment program to the USA, in an attempt to court investors. Earlier this year, the Government had launched a regional investment forum, which brought together both local and regional investors and financiers to examine projects with a view to investing, and thus expanding the agricultural potential of the nation.
I was disappointed when our local media houses did not find out just what were the projects that were being offered by Government. But I was told that private landowners did advance some of their own projects.
I believe that both the private landed class and the Government, which still has thousands of acres of arable land at its disposal, should have made a greater effort to have local Guyanese invest in these projects, even if it was through share offering.
I appreciate how important it is for plantation-type farming to take place in Guyana. We need such large scale projects, especially given the distribution pattern of lands in Guyana, where in some cases rice farmers have plots as small as five acres, which certainly cannot allow for efficient cultivation.
I see the land problem as being critical also to the creation of jobs, and thus to the alleviation of poverty; and therefore, while I support plantation-type agriculture, I wish to emphasize that there is a serious disparity between large landowners and small holders.
I recall that, when Cheddi took over in 1992, he explained that over 70% of the land in Guyana is owned by only five per cent of the population. Thus we already have an imbalance in terms of landowning, with a few rich people owning the vast majority of land. This was a problem that the PPP inherited, but which it seems to have done little to correct.
Guyana should learn from the example of Latin America, with its caudillo class and the stark inequalities which land ownership has created in those countries. Cheddi was committed to redressing that imbalance. One of the first acts that he did upon becoming President of Guyana was to force someone who had gotten massive amounts of land under the Hoyte Administration to give back a fair portion of that land, so that these could be given to small farmers. The person who originally got the land still ended up with a great deal of land.
This column has persistently argued that the greatest beneficiary under the PNC, dating back to the Burnham era, was a small group of wealthy families. Cheddi was conscious of this, even while he was acutely aware of the need to ensure large scale investors.
The PPP itself, I believe, made major missteps when it opened up the Intermediate Savannahs for investment. This area was never expected to be easy to cultivate, and would have required a great deal of investment. But the PPP showed it wore the same colours as the PNC when it shared out massive chunks of land in the Intermediate Savannahs. This area has not been developed to its full potential because of this colossal blunder on the part of the PPP, which has always prided itself on being a working class party, but which, since it assumed power in 1992, has come under the wing of the bourgeoisie class.
I understand that the Intermediate Savannahs is one of the areas identified for proposed investment. I am asking what happened to the leases that were granted to those large investors years ago. Have these been reclaimed? And what provision is being made to allow for medium scale and small farmers residing in Guyana to have access to those resources for the purposes of development?
Land is an important variable in the reduction of poverty. If the Government and the donor community which is plugging investment in agriculture are serious about reducing poverty, they first have to address the gross inequalities in land distribution.
This is why I am arguing for all these proposals which were taken to New York recently to be offered to the Guyanese people living at home. There is no shortage of capital. The local banks are awash in liquidity, and it would help the local banking sector and, by extension, the economy if local investors could be given a bite of the cherry when it comes to these projects.
After all, does charity not begin at home? Or would a first offer of land to locals be seen as an act of benevolence and charity on the part of the Government?

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