Caricom’s agri recalcitrance

Jun 09, 2009 Editorial

“It’s the projects that matter and not the chat,” pointed out President Jagdeo. No, it was not at the just concluded 2009 “Public/Private Sector Consultation on AgriBusiness Development in the Caribbean” where he actually called for “less talk and more action”.
It was uttered a year ago (2008) almost to the day at another Caricom-sponsored forum dedicated to agriculture – the “Regional Agriculture Investment Forum” at the International Convention Centre at Liliendaal.

With “one-hundred and fifty stakeholders” – two heads of state, Ministers of Government of CARICOM, investors, financiers, multilateral financial institutions, commercial bankers and “other” officials in attendance, the mega-meeting was declared a “historic success”.
Twenty-five “concrete” agri-businesses were identified projects – four from Guyana – and follow-ups were faithfully promised. Senator Arnold Piggott, Minister of Agriculture, Land and Marine Resources of T&T promised to provide the template of his country’s “private sector-led and -driven (seventeen) mega farms concept” to prevent “duplication”.
Prime Minister Manning had also earlier independently mentioned collaborating with Guyana on developing 120,000 acres of land in Guyana for agriculture. At this year’s meeting not a single word was mentioned about any of these initiatives.

They have simply sunk into the swamp of past promises.
Some of those promises had been thrown out at the yet previous year’s 2007 Agriculture Donors Conference in Port of Spain where CARICOM Heads of State, Agriculture and Finance Ministers etc. were joined by bilateral, multilateral, and regional donors that predicted “financial and technical support for the agricultural thematic areas and the supporting projects.”
President Jagdeo warned that “the injection of new and added finance into the Region’s agriculture is necessary for it to survive and remain viable.” US$10 million was pledged –we still do not know it was collected or spent.
The year before that (2006) the President, as lead Head on Agriculture, had summoned the region’s agricultural Ministers to “accelerate implementation” of the “Jagdeo Initiative”: ‘Strengthening Agriculture for Sustainable Development’.
This initiative, approved the year before in 2005, had comprehensively identified the ‘constraints” on agricultural development and allocated responsibility for addressing them had been allocated to the member states.

The constraints and matched Ministers were: 1. Limited financing and Inadequate New Investments: Barbados; 2. Inadequate R&D: St. Lucia; 3. Outdated & Inefficient AHFS: Trinidad/Tobago; 4. Fragmented & Uncoordinated Private Sector: Vincent/Grenadines; 5. Deficient & Uncoordinated Risk Management Measures: Antigua/Barbuda; 6. Inefficient Land & Water Distribution & Management Systems: Guyana: 7. Inadequate Transportation Systems: St. Kitts and Nevis; 8 & 9. Weak and Non-integrated Information and Intelligence Systems and Services and the Need to Participate in Growth Market Segments: Jamaica; and 10. Lack of Trained Human Resources: Dominica.
And yet we keep on having meetings to identify “constraints”. Caricom, launched in 1973, had inherited concerns about agricultural development from its predecessor Carifta but there was little or no focus in the intervening years to the Regional Transformation Programme for Agriculture (RTPA) that had been crafted by its bureaucrats. Starting in 2002, President Jagdeo began making interventions that culminated by 2004 in the initiative that bears his name.

In the 2006 meeting, President Jagdeo circulated a detailed presentation to the Ministers emphasised the need to focus on three critical points: the declining contribution of agriculture to the Region’s Gross Domestic Product; the food import Bill which exceeds US$3B and the seriousness of investment taking place in agriculture across the region, which has consequences of rural poverty.
It was obviously to no avail.
To repeat our suggestion made several times last year – we should not waste too much (if any) time with Caricom on agriculture any longer. For whatever reason, it is obvious that the member states of the body are not serious about the sector at the regional level. It could be that since Guyana has a comparative advantage in this area, they believe that we would benefit inordinately from the US$3 billion food bill that could be supplied locally.
Be as it may, we are on our own, and should focus on new initiatives such as the agricultural component of the “Low Carbon Development Strategy” being launched.

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