Holder’s visit to IICA lacked clear vision for agricultural development in Guyana
Dear Editor,
It was reported in the news media on April 29, that Minister of Agriculture Noel Holder and his delegation returned home after a familiarization tour of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and Costa Rica in Central America.
It was claimed that Minister Holder held fruitful discussions with the IICA and sought technical assistance for the Ministry of Agriculture to better understand Guyana’s topography, soil characteristic and low crop productivity, as well as means and methods to optimise marketing of surplus crop production and develop a swift strategy for dairy production in the country. Exploratory visits were also made to banana and cocoa plantations.
It was evident that Minister Holder’s whirlwind visit to the IICA and Costa Rica at taxpayers’ expense lacked a clear vision for agricultural development in Guyana as he departed the country without a viable agriculture development plan which would have provided a blueprint for specific assistance and investment from the institutions he visited. He returned home empty handed, but listed a lot of facilities he visited, purportedly to justify his mission.
After a year in office Minister Holder seems to have lost his way. He has prepared no development plan for agriculture, which is in disarray, for consideration and implementation by the APNU+AFC government. Rice and sugar are on the skids. Yet he seems to be devoting his energies to dreaming about the development of cocoa, bananas, livestock and dairy farming, whereas he should be giving more attention to the promising rice industry to make it more efficient and productive. For example, the drainage and irrigation systems should be improved to allow farmers to grow three crops per year.
Varieties should be developed for higher yields. The marketing board should be restructured to enable surpluses to be sold quickly and profitably on the world market, thereby cutting out the long wait farmers have to endure to receive payment for their crops. Sugar will never return to its former glory since the industry is not viable and is quickly falling apart as the capital investment necessary to make it efficient and productive to compete on the world market is just not available.
Minister Holder is still in a quandary as to what should be done to the sugar estates as production slides and subsidies mount, but he is bent on closing them one by one with no alternative productive use for the farmlands and employment for the displaced workers.
Livestock development in the Rupununi and immediate savannahs should be seriously considered, but cattle breeds have to be developed and ranches improved to provide the quantity and quality of beef required for export. A visit by experts from the Guyana Livestock Authority to Brazil and Uruguay rather than Costa Rica to gain knowledge in these areas will be most helpful for the development of Guyana’s fledgling industry.
Finally, Guyana has no commercial dairy production although in years gone by milk from as far away as Leguan Island and Mahaica was being transported daily to a plant in Kingston for processing and sale. Bookers had an experimental dairy at Bel Air while the PNC government/DDL also had one at Versailles. Somewhere in the archives, there should be a trove of valuable information with respect to the success/ failure of these dairies. The information thus retrieved, together with what Minister Holder recently gathered from Costa Rica could very well form the basis for the start of a viable dairy industry in Guyana. Therefore, Minister Holder should stop dragging his feet and make a positive start quickly.
Yours faithfully,
Charles Sohan