The Breadbasket of the Caribbean

Aug 12, 2020 Editorial

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In a detailed report to Richard Nolte, then Executive Director of the Washington, DC-based Institute of Current World Affairs, writer Frank McDonald, introduced the newly independent nation of Guyana thusly:
“Though underdeveloped except for the coastal belt, Guyana is very rich in potential. In the interior, there are vast forests, mineral deposits of bauxite, gold, diamonds and manganese. But more important than any actual resource is the future of the country as a “breadbasket of the Caribbean.” The soil and climate of the interior particularly what is called the Savannah, is the ideal region for settling the excess populations of the smaller islands, a concept not lost on the governments of the West Indies. Already, there is a trickle of West Indians into the Guyanese interior to establish farming communities, a movement encouraged by the country’s government for reasons which have political consequences as well as the more obvious economic benefits.”
This was on page two of a 27-page document sent to Nolte in November of 1969, a year before Guyana became a Republic, and four years before the Burnham government’s 1973, “Feed, Clothe and House the Nation” Initiative. This country’s relationship to agriculture of course has been a fundamental, historic one, beginning with the exploitative history of the sugar plantation from slavery through indentureship to colonialism through to nationalization and relative modernization. Parallel to sugar has been the primarily private but still consequential rice industry, our second most important agricultural export and foreign currency earner. In addition to that, we’ve had a vibrant and varied agricultural sector from coconut farming to vegetables to fisheries.
Subsequent political administrations have wrestled with the challenges of transforming our agriculture in a way that both provides us with food security at the national level, but also helps us to sustainably achieve that title that McDonald communicated to Nolte fifty years ago, “the bread basket of the Caribbean.” That term has arguably had a greater national mythos for us than that of El Dorado – the problem of course is that, if gold exports have been any indication, it is the latter mythos that is true.
The closest we’ve come is the then iteration of the regional Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) more commonly known as the Jagdeo Initiative, an ambitious plan put forward in 2003 by, yes, then Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo, with Guyana supposed to play a central role in bringing stability to CARICOM regional food security.
Guyana’s National Strategy for Agriculture 2013-2020 goes as far as joining the two concepts with the lofty claim that:
“Agriculture 2020 is consistent with Guyana’s destiny as the “bread basket of the
Caribbean”. It is, therefore, consistent with the Regional Food and Nutrition Security Policy and Plan for CARICOM. It also is consistent with the CARICOM Agriculture Vision 2015 and takes into consideration the 10 Key Binding Constraints for Agriculture in CARICOM identified in the Jagdeo Initiative.”
It is unclear whether that plan survived the tenure of then Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Leslie Ramsammmy, to make it into the Granger administration. One year into his presidency, Granger himself was looking at ‘reviewing’ the Jagdeo Initiative, but still kept the commitment to the breadbasket dream. According to a Kaieteur News report of June 2016, Granger “stated that the agricultural landscape will be transformed in the coming years and Guyana will be able to produce more food which can be processed and marketed in the Eastern Caribbean – which is important.”
That of course did not happen. The reality is that despite all our potential, we have not ever been able to develop our food production to satisfy a diversified export market to the region, even within the framework of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy.
Twenty years after the Jagdeo Initiative was started, we’re no closer to this breadbasket reality than we were in 1969. It is time perhaps that we aim for a more practical vision. Currently, we need to take hard and painful decisions on how we retool the agriculture sector to take into consideration a complex variety of factors including: climate change, particularly coastal flooding; economic diversification into new crops; market access, regionally and further; public infrastructure, particularly sector-specific initiatives like farm to market roads; value-added processing and manufacturing; mechanization and technological innovation, including AI integration; food culture, both nationally and regionally, something Burnham had disastrously ignored in his import substitution programme of the early 1980s; the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; and of, of course, capitalization.
It is in that last area that we’ve had the most positive variable between 1969 and now, specifically with the revenue from our new oil and gas sector. With the financial year almost over, the new administration will next month be producing a four-month budget that will take us to the end of 2020. However, 2021 cannot come without some hard decisions taken when it comes to transforming the agricultural sector in keeping with long-term national sustainable development and not a short-term myopic politically expedient agenda. It may be that we are at long last within the dream of becoming the breadbasket of the Caribbean, but that will only come at the end of meaningful assessment and comprehensive planning for the future – anything less and all that we will be constructing for ourselves is a basket to fetch water.

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