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Caricom’s Featherbedding

Oct 29, 2010 Editorial

Here we are with the end of 2010 pretty much drawing nigh, and after the obligatory meetings, workshops, consultations and other talkshops, we have a “Regional Food and Nutrition Security Policy and Action Plan” (RFNSPAP). Since it was now decided that for the plan to be viable the various organs of CARICOM should be brought on board, the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD), signed off last week right here in Georgetown, and this week in Grenada it was the turn of the Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED).
We expect that in the weeks ahead, there will be meetings for other signings before the document is laid before the CARICOM Heads of Government at their Inter-sessional Meeting early next year.
But then what, unless we are just supporting featherbedding at CARICOM?
We can get a sense of what to expect from the reported remarks of the Chair of the Special COTED meeting in Grenada, Minister of Food Production, Land and Marine Affairs of Trinidad and Tobago, Vasant Bharath. He advised sagely, “We have been importing vast amounts of goods – US$3B worth of food in the CARICOM region last year alone – most of which we can actually grow ourselves…the things that we have all the land to produce…I think what has to happen now is that we’ve got to go back to our individual countries and we’ve got to organize our farming sector. In many instances, unfortunately, our farmers don’t run their farms as businesses; they run it on a kind of subsistence basis”.
Nothing untoward, one may say about the remarks. Excepting that his T&T predecessor, Senator Arnold Piggott, had only the year before announced to the “CARICOM Agriculture Investment Forum”, his country’s plans to create some seventeen “mega-farms” to deal with the acknowledged food security crisis that the region was facing. He was in turn elaborating on his PM (Manning)’s unilateral announcement to launch thirteen mega farms in the twin island.
Manning’s announcement came after our Minister of Agriculture had approached the Trinidadians on the possibility of providing financing for jointly developing farms in Guyana, after the former had also earlier mentioned collaborating with Guyana on developing 120,000 acres of land in Guyana for agriculture. As far as we are aware, our Minister has never received any response to his offer from T&T, yet they had the chutzpah to place advertisements in the Guyana newspapers for proposals!  We would have been possibly roused to some hope of CARICOM ever getting their act together on agriculture and food security if Minister Bharath could have advised on the fate of the T&T mega farms.
After all, Senator Arnold Piggott, had promised to provide the template of his country’s “private sector-led and -driven mega farms concept” to other CARICOM members so as to prevent “duplication”. At that year’s meeting, and also this, not a single word was mentioned about any of these initiatives. They have simply sunk into the swamp of past promises. And this we predict will be the fate of the latest initiative.
Agriculture, after all, was always pronounced as central to the mission of CARICOM. In 1973, the year of its founding, it announced a “Regional Food and Nutrition Plan” followed in later years by the “Regional Transformation Programme in Agriculture”, the CARICOM/FAO Regional Special Program for Food Security (SPFS) etc. In 1989, the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas launching the CSME promised: “fundamental transformation of the region’s agriculture sector to a market oriented internationally competitive and environmentally sound production of agriculture products, improved income and employment opportunities, nutrition security and poverty alleviation.”
From 2002, of course, President Jagdeo has been plugging away with the Initiative that bears his name. Nine constraints were identified to the development of agriculture, and responsibilities for taking the lead in overcoming them were allocated to specific countries in the form of their leaders that constitute the highest forum of CARICOM. Yet nothing.
We echo the sentiments of Minister of Agriculture Robert Persaud who predicted at the RFNSPAP workshop that unless the binding constrains noted by the Jagdeo Initiative are addressed, it will all be for naught.

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