6-05-08, 7:15 pm

Georgetown, Jun 5 (Prensa Latina) Caribbean officials and businesspeople will meet in this capital of Guyana on June 6-7 to discuss about two dozen proposals to be presented to investors in order to attract them to put their money into food production in this region.

Projects in that field aim to create mega farms in countries with abundant but uncultivated land like Guyana, Suriname, Belize, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, reported the Antigua Sun from Georgetown.

Trinidad and Tobago, for one, has asked Cuba to send experts to help it set up mega farms, and has indicated to authorities in Guyana that it might well lease large tracts of land here to have these farms produce food for the oil and gas-rich twin-island republic that has fancied and touted itself as a petro and light manufacturing economy.

The Regional Agriculture Investment Forum was summoned by regional governments to help them deal with a developing food crisis that triggered deadly riots in Haiti in April, attacks on food trucks in Trinidad and strikes by sugar workers in Guyana over the past two months.

This will be the first such meeting in the 35-year history of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), in part because food was cheap and countries opted to concentrate on tourism and the services sector than on providing cheap food for their populations.

One example is St. Lucia where banana production has decayed from 120 thousand tons to only 30 thousand in 2007, reducing export revenues that reached 200-300 million dollars at the most, because tourism represented incomes of one billion dollars.

But now, when every penny counts, the Caribbean spends $3 billion in food imports, figure that should rocket to double or triple this year with the soaring prices of agricultural produce and fuel.

Chairman of the Investment Forum James Moss-Solomon said the region finds itself in such a precarious position now because it had not only neglected agriculture for tourism in the past but had also not seen the need to deal with agriculture because prices were cheap and it was simply easier to import.

The idea of this week's meeting, according to Moss-Solomon quoted by the Antigua Sun, is to get presidents, prime ministers and other experts in a single space to talk about nothing else but agriculture.

Forum co-ordinator Maxine Harris says there is an abundance of rich but uncultivated land in several of the larger CARICOM member states like Guyana, Suriname, Belize, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago that could be used to set up mega farms once investors could be convinced about their feasibility.

As an indication of how desperate times are and how the mentality is changing, just last week Jamaican Agriculture Minister Chris Tufton announced a twin policy programme to get technical experts from Guyana to come to Jamaica and advise on reviving the once thriving rice sector that had produced up to 500,000 pounds of rice annually.

Jamaica is today almost completely dependent on 60,000 annual tonnes from Guyana or from cheaper and highly subsidized rice from southern states in the US. Jamaica will buy an additional 10,000 tonnes from American farmers this year to ensure domestic supplies and to cater for the needs of at least two million tourists.

The other part of the two-point Jamaican government policy has to do with plans to follow the 1980s lead of St. Vincent & the Grenadines in planting and milling its own rice on land in Guyana for domestic consumption back home.

Harris said that 'about 20 bankable projects' would be presented to potential investors at the forum, many of them from farmers needing seed or venture capital, improved technology, partners in the air and sea transport business and in other key areas.

She said governments have already come up with an incentives scheme to roll out at the forum and agreement to fast-forward infrastructural development in areas where mega farms will spring up, access roads and irrigation systems as examples.

Agriculture is indeed more than food on the table, said Jamaican minister Tufton and recalled it provides the basis for a manufacturing sector; it supports tourism, contributes to the transportation sector and is a significant driver of rural development.

Prensa Latina