Regional Agri-Development

The Trinidad Parliament was informed by their country’s Finance Minister that Trinidad was taking up an offer from Guyana to invest in agricultural development here. The announcement took some by surprise in Guyana and it exhibits an unfortunate tendency for regional governments not to coordinate announcements that affect each other. In this case, the offer of 10,000 acres of virgin land to be developed by investors from Trinidad had been made last year when their Food Production Minister Devant Maharaj visited Guyana to explore their options on the “Jagdeo Initiative”.
That initiative had been on the cards for CariCom since 2004 and was supposed to address the food security of the region. Ten constraints preventing self-sufficiency in food production and different territories were identified and responsibility assigned for eliminating them. Towards the constraint of suitable land, Guyana made a standing offer of land at a nominal long term lease cost. Unfortunately at the time, Barbados insisted on looking at Brazil while Trinidad embarked on a number of “mega farms” in their own island.
Neither initiative went anywhere: especially notable was the Trinidadian foray where huge sums were expended in which, in retrospect, could only be described as “boondoggles”. A Barbadian private company, Santa Fe, was later to take up the offer and is presently conducting experimental trials on the feasibility of cultivating a variety of products, starting with rice, in the Rupununi. It appears Trinidad has accepted that the “mega farms” approach has failed and one of the major reasons is that, as is the case of many countries where the economy is approaching developed country status, youths are not gravitating towards farming. In fact, for most of the farming that is done in Trinidad, Guyanese immigrants provide much of the labour.
But questions have been asked by the Trinidadian farming associations that need to be answered. For instance, how will exports from Guyana lower their food bill? They forget that if the farms are owned by Trinidadians, the profits will be repatriated to Trinidad. However, there needs to more specificity, as to exactly what role the Trinidadians will play beyond providing the capital. Based on the experience of their failed mega farms, it would appear that they cannot even supply the managerial expertise necessary to supervise the farms. In Guyana, we are experiencing the same problem in the GuySuCo operations and it will be interesting to see what incentives the Trinidadian owners of the farms offer to attract necessary managerial talent.
But the announcement of the agreement with Trinidad and the ongoing experiments with Santa Fe should alert us on the need to get ready for the exploitation of our agricultural land in the Canje Basin, the Intermediate Savannahs and the Interior, Rupununi Savannahs. As with the Trinidadian mega farms the success or failure of large-scale industrial farming in Guyana will depend on our ability to supply agricultural workers. Aside from managers, we have not been able to supply workers to GuySuCo.
But since most of the new farmland will be in virgin territory away from the populated coastland, the Black Bush Polder Scheme might provide better pointers on the way forward. One lesson is that labourers will have to be relocated to the new farms, but if they are not housed into a community, there will be a number of social problems manifested. One solution would be to establish a self-contained township for all the workers and their families that will service the original 10,000 acres, leaving enough room for increase occasioned by the later enlargement of the farming area.
Another source of ambiguity is whether Guyana will benefit beyond providing workers. In our estimation, the benefits will far outweigh whatever downside foreign ownership of farms might have. At a minimum, there will be a demonstrator effect on the running of multi-crop agriculture here. For whatever reasons, our farmers have stuck to the mono-crops, rice and sugar, when it comes industrial farming.
Let us at long last begin to exploit our agricultural potential to its fullest.