Given this is Agriculture month; I thought it appropriate to re-address a topic I have discussed many times in this column, that Guyana has the capacity as a nation to feed the entire region. This last weekend I spent some time with the Honourable Minister of Tourism of St Lucia who was with me in Atlanta to speak at the Caribbean Awards. Our conversation kept going back to why can’t Guyana really and truly become the feeder of the region. I called the topic, “Guyana – The Green Anchor”. With the hotel boom in the region, especially in St Kitts and St Lucia, the Minister told me we must quickly solve the transportation issues that prohibit us from gaining the larger markets.. He is an advocate for the Fast Ferry Service and I discussed our previous plan for an Air Cargo Service for the region.
Our strategy must not only be to produce quality products, and just find small markets as GMC is doing, but must develop a comprehensive plan that includes development of the top exportable products, transportation, tax free zones for shipping, reduction of export taxes and pushing for a Caricom plan similar to what exists in the United States for Minority Businesses. In addition, we must focus on job creation and sound investment strategy for productivity gains in the sector and agro-enterprise development. Caricom needs to ensure for example that the cruise lines buy at least 15% of fresh fruits and vegetables from the region. At this point most of the fresh fruits and vegetables for the cruise lines come from Thailand on a daily basis yet this industry utilizes the region’s ports and does little to aid the countries apart from local spending by the tourists. This market alone is in the thousands of people on a daily basis.
Guyana is blessed with an over-abundance of natural resources including very fertile agricultural lands with over 200 types of fruits and vegetables, many rivers and large bodies of water, vast areas of tropical hardwood forests with over 1200 species, abundant shrimp and fish grounds. Guyana’s incredible biodiversity and vast stretches of pristine equatorial rainforest make it an important natural treasure within the Western Hemisphere that could be utilised in an environmentally friendly and sustainable manner for the benefit of Guyanese and the global community.
Guyana is 83,000 square miles or 215,000 square kilometres. Its population density is three people per square mile and 75 percent of its land mass is uninhabited. With the ultimate future requirement of a well functioning Caricom if the small countries of the Caribbean are to survive in the future, Guyana’s land mass can be one of the key sustaining elements, agriculturally, for Caricom .
Given the continued crisis in the sugar industry, many Caricom leaders have argued forcefully in recent years for the transition of their agricultural sector away from the traditional crops of sugar or rice, given prevailing market conditions, the uneconomic productive capacity of many islands and even Guyana, and the reductions in subsidies for these commodities in key international markets. We have seen recently the Jamaican need for rice which couldn’t be fully supplied from our local sources. Our overall thrust must be to make agriculture more competitive and diversified and to play a key role in Caribbean regional integration for food security.
As our Minister of Agriculture said recently in his speech “Guyana is a net exporter of food, and is firmly committed to working with the Member States of the Caribbean Community through increased production, trade and joint ventures, to reduce the region’s high food import bill in the wake of spiralling world food prices.” Let us work together to develop a more comprehensive plan and the right incentives and investment climate that can attract partnerships which ultimately benefit our hard working farmers. Until next week “Roop”
