Food security and the private sector: The T&T example

Three week ends ago, at the forum held in Georgetown to map out strategies for regional food security, Trinidad and Tobago’s Minister of Agriculture Arnold Piggot outlined the framework for his country’s national agri-business development programme, the twin-island Republic’s envisaged response to the global food crisis.

Allowing for the fact that plans on paper still need to be actualized before their worth can be properly evaluated,  Trinidad and Tobago’s food strategy blueprint makes interesting reading for several   reasons.

First, it envisages what Mr. Piggot describes as the “repositioning of agriculture,” not only in terms of enhancing its position of prominence on the country’s development agenda but also from the standpoint of creating a new concept of agriculture which, as Mr. Piggot puts it, eschews “the traditional narrow context in which it has been seen and valued only in terms of the farm output.” What Trinidad and Tobago now seeks to do, Mr. Piggot says, is to value agriculture “in the broader context of agri-business ……… embracing the concept that the sector includes agricultural production, agri-processing, food manufacturing, special and unique culinary cuisine, food service and agri-entertainment/agri tourism.”

Coming from Trinidad and Tobago, a country whose economy has long been heavily dependent on the energy sector, a plan that embraces such a radical re-conceptualization of agriculture is particularly significant. What Mr. Piggott essentially told the Georgetown forum is that his country – apparently having learnt the lessons  of costly food imports and the uneasiness associated with the danger of food vulnerability – is now fully prepared to effect a veritable U-turn in the way it perceives agriculture in the context of the long-term development of Trinidad and Tobago.

The vision itself is a particularly interesting one. It envisages mega-farms, supported by huge investments in supporting technology and the creation of farming associations that can collectively benefit from various forms of state support including financial support. Then there are its value-added aspects that are linked to the food processing and manufacturing sectors and the  agri-entertainment and agri-manufacturing industries. 

What is, however, most instructive about the Trinidad and Tobago food security blueprint are the central and multi-faceted roles that it assigns to the private sector, roles that place the business community at the very heart of the initiative to reposition agriculture.
The private sector, Piggott told the Georgetown food forum, can anticipate “strong financial and institutional support” for its agri-business organizations; and while the creation of the mechanisms  to “reposition” agriculture are the responsibility of the government, these new mechanisms will be run entirely by the private sector which will take responsibility for “coordinating the public agencies that are involved in the implementation of the non-commercial components of the programme including land-administration, farm infrastructure, marketing and information infrastructure and loan financing.”

What Mr. Piggott is in effect saying is that the Trinidad and Tobago government is placing in the hands of the country’s private sector both the authority and the responsibility  for the repositioning of agriculture to create national food security.

By any stretch of the imagination this amounts to an open concession that the private sector is, in fact, the engine of growth and that the private sector is regarded as perhaps better equipped than government to “run with” the agri-business initiative. What also appears to be coming out in the Trinidad and Tobago initiative to reposition agriculture is a concern that the initiative not become stymied by needless state interventions and bureaucratic hindrances and by state and quasi-state institutions which – at the very least – needlessly clutter processes, frustrate investors and, in sum, undermine their own good intentions.

And while the question as to whether the local private sector has the capacity to effectively undertake those responsibilities which the Trinidad and Tobago food security blueprint assigns to its own private sector remains to be answered, the government here can learn valuable lessons from Port-of-Spain’s example of empowering the private sector.