On May 19 last, the Ministry of Agriculture, through its Rural Affairs Secretariat, announced its COVID-19 Kitchen Garden Initiative. As explained by the Ministry, the idea behind the initiative was to help provide a nutritional balance to families and a deterrence from toxic chemical use, harming persons and the environment in a time when maintaining healthy immune systems is priority, as part of the Ministry’s Rural Entrepreneurial Agricultural Project (R.E.A.P).
One assumes, of course, that the avoidance of toxic chemicals and the protection of immune systems are high on the Ministry’s list of priorities at all times and that leaving those considerations aside, the substantive purpose of the initiative is to seek to provide a food security option for persons whose incomes may have been depleted or even lost altogether in account of COVID-19-related job losses.
Of course, every little helps in circumstances such as these and here, one assumes that the so-called Rural Entrepreneurial Enterprise Project (REAP) is open to urban Guyanese as well, providing they are inclined to take up the offer and that their dwelling space can accommodate at least a modest gardening effort.
The Kitchen Garden Initiative, we are further told, “will see persons receiving assistance to acquire small garden tools, seeds, irrigation and other planting material to get their kitchen gardens going.” This is what Minister Yearwood-Adams is quoted as saying. Here, one assumes (again) that given the conditions that attend the COVID-19 emergency, this project will not be ‘decorated’ with elaborate and time-consuming procedures and that subject to checks to determine that the recipients of materials provided by the state, (again to quote Minister Yearwood-Adams), “will see persons receiving assistance to acquire small garden tools, seeds, irrigation and other planting material to get their kitchen gardens going.” Interestingly, no specific mention is made here of direct cash allocations to beneficiaries.
One makes this point mindful of the fact that projects that include actual cash components or cash intended for clearly spelt out purposes relating to the advancement of an actual project frequently run in to accountability problems associated with profligate spending or the misdirection of funds. One recalls, for example, the earliest period of the financial allocations associated with the creation of the Small Business Bureau where monies were misdirected by some of the the recipients. Indeed, some of the projects which those monies were intended to advance simply never got off the ground or ‘crashed and burned’ immediately after takeoff.
Mind you, there is nothing wrong with Kitchen Garden initiatives if these are preceded by some verifiable assessment of the recipients’ ability to execute effectively. The rationale must, of necessity, include, the recipients’ possession of physical infrastructure (land space) on which to execute the exercise as well as, crucially, some kind of assessment of the recipients’ aptitude for and disposition to agriculture, in the first place. In the absence of these such a project is on a hiding to nowhere.
Quite possibly, the REAP project assumes that the emergency circumstances associated with COVID-19 could well bring out the best in people and that, in the circumstances, even those who may have had no experience in kitchen-gardening will apply their minds to the pursuit. That kind of positive thinking may well bear some measure of fruit and once it does to any significant degree then we can always not bother too much with a minority that may just be too set in their ways to change, anyway. On the other hand there are those who may argue that such resources as are being allocated to the REAP Kitchen Garden project may, perhaps, more suitably be allocated to already established and efficiently-run farms and as a contractual quid pro quo, they commit to making produce available at affordable prices or in instances where means-tested rationale are applied, at no cost. Coming to think of it, an approach like this may even benefit our agro-processors, who, as we report elsewhere in this issue, are experiencing challenging times.
If this may seem as a sort of ‘put down’ for the ‘kitchen garden’ initiative project. We iterate that we believe that given proper application and oversight it can provide a more than useful subsidy to families that can do with that kind of support at this time. We insist, however, there is nothing wrong with putting other options on the table which are believed to be worthy of consideration, even if, after careful consideration, they are eventually set aside. The point here is that at least these ‘other ideas’ must benefit from equally robust consideration.
