British to help NARI cut energy costs

Feb 28, 2009 News

The British High Commission is to provide the National Agriculture Institute (NARI) with seven solar-powered lamps that will provide security lighting and remove the necessity of electric lighting and back-up generator power for night work at the farm.
The provision of the solar-powered lamps supports UK efforts to help diversify agriculture here, particularly the Texel/Texana sheep programme that continues to make significant progress.
According to the High Commission, the lamps will be handed over to NARI by mid-April. The lamps will be supplied and fitted by local company Farfan and Mendes at a cost of $6 million.
The solar-powered lamps will help to reduce NARI’s energy bill, and the assistance is consistent with the UK’s wider assistance to the realisation of the President’s low carbon development vision for Guyana.
“I strongly believe that the diversification of agriculture holds the best economic prospect for Guyana in the short to medium term,” said the British High Commissioner Fraser Wheeler said.
“Guyana has real competitive advantage, and I believe that, although the global investment climate is extraordinarily difficult now, large-scale investment can be attracted here if the right conditions are created.
“Such a strategy is consistent with the President’s low carbon development vision and his regional agricultural initiative. This latest donation should be seen in the wider context of our support in this area,” Wheeler said in a press release issued by the High Commission yesterday.
In 2007, the High Commission agreed with Minister of Agriculture Robert Persaud that the UK could add most direct value to the diversification of agriculture by focusing support on livestock genetics and aquaculture.
The High Commission works closely with the Ministry of Agriculture, NARI and the Guyana Trade and Investment Support project (funded by the U.S. government) to make this happen.
That same year the High Commission, including the Department for International Development, with the Ministry of Agriculture and NARI, started a project to commercialise Guyana’s sheep industry through the introduction of the British Texel sheep.
Following successful transfers of Texel embryos and crossbreeding with the local Barbados Black-belly, a local Texana breed has been developed with the desired “meatiness” of the Texel and hardiness of the Black-belly.
The project is also helping to build capacity at NARI by introducing new livestock management techniques, training in pasture and farm management, and providing equipment.
In 2007, too, the High Commission also donated “super-male” tilapia brood-stock to the Mon Repos Aquaculture Station to help boost the station’s capacity to supply fingerlings to fresh-tilapia farms, especially in rural communities where farmers are diversifying their economic activities.
Each “super-male” set, comprising one male and three suitable females, is capable of producing under optimal conditions between 5000-10,000 fingerlings per year, and can maintain this production rate for up to eight years.
A further 1,700 sets of the “supermale” tilapia broodstock is being donated by DFID to stock a planned fish hatchery.
The National Aquaculture Association of Guyana has announced that such assistance has the potential in the longer term to create more than 1000 new jobs and bring in US$70.4 million for the industry.

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