In circumstances where Guyana’s long-term economic prosperity is, these days, increasingly seen as anchored to the country’s emerging oil & gas industry, it was somewhat reassuring to hear the President’s recent comment at Ebini that “agriculture, food security and our ability to service the regional market is our future” to which he added that “all of our efforts will be to ensure we transfer enough resources to this sector to make it viable and resilient.”
What makes the comment significant is that it appears designed to send a message that the country is not on the threshold of placing the ‘eggs’ of its development solely in what one might call an oil & gas ‘basket’ leaving an agriculture sector that has served us well up until now, lying by the wayside and running the risk of setting the country on an acute food security deficiency path. One expects, of course, that the President is aware that his administration is likely to be ‘called out’ in circumstances where the reality turns out to be at variance with what he has had to say on the matter recently.
If the acute awareness of the economic prospects that derive from our oil & gas resources is altogether understandable, there are times when we appear overwhelmed by those prospects, so much so that our contemplation for our future leaves our agriculture laying in a heap by the wayside, One of the considerations which our thinking may not yet have taken account of is the fact that what has now become a difficult to deny, science-driven message, about the inevitability of a global climate-driven emergency has placed the fossil fuel recovery in an altogether different light. Sooner, rather than later, decisions that have to do with the continued recovery of fossil fuels will have to be made and expectations with regard to the economic returns that oil & gas will yield for countries will have to be adjusted.
This is not to say that the global attention now being focussed on the emergence of the so-called South American basin as the world’s emerging ‘hotspot’ as far as oil & gas reserves are concerned will disappear. It is, however, not likely to be as long-lived as we might believe at this time. The way forward reposes in making hay while the sun shines by converting the resources that accrue from oil & gas into what can be described as the more viable long-term options.
All this, of course underscores what the President had to say recently about “sustainable food and agriculture” and the sector’s ability to “service the regional market” being Guyana’s “sustainable future,” a message that ought to resonate with the rest of the region where the available evidence as reflected in the extent of those countries’ exorbitant food bills points to scandalous indifference to the food security of a Caribbean which, for all sorts of reasons – some of which have to do with the vicissitudes of what are now erratic weather patterns – are now acutely vulnerable to food security-related challenges.
The Guyana reality is, of course, that while our agriculture sector has afforded us the distinction of being the standout food producer in the region, our policy makers and public officials continue to play the ‘stuck record’ about Guyana being a food-secure nation even though a cursory glance at just what food security means suggests that nothing can be further from the truth. While it is true that there may be sufficient food being produced here to feed our modest population, we continue to fall short in areas such as countrywide sustained access to sufficient quantities of sufficiently nutritional foods which is one of the critical criteria for food security.
What the political administration ought, surely, to be aware of by now is the reality of a continually emerging dichotomy between the articulation of the virtues of a robust agriculture sector, on the one hand, and the reality of a country whose global radar now appears firmly fixed on its ‘oil riches’, on the other. What we therefore have to be mindful of are those deliberately sculpted, sound-bite driven tag lines that cling to the delusion that we are, what we call, an agricultural economy, when the facts suggest differently.
This of course is not to say that we should cease to make ‘hay’ out of our oil & gas resources while the sun or what is left of the global climate change reprieve still shines. We must do so however, possessed of the knowledge that in the longer term, it is the constancy of our capacity to feed ourselves and to help feed the rest of the region that is really our trump card. Our development agenda must reflect that reality.
