Guyana and T&T are forg­ing ahead with an agree­ment which al­lows for in­vestors from T&T to en­gage in large scale farm­ing in Guyana, and will see both coun­tries en­gag­ing in more eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ties.Ear­li­er this year, a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) was signed be­tween for 10,000 acres of Guyana to be made avail­able to T&T in­vestors and farm­ers for agri­cul­tur­al de­vel­op­ment.

Dur­ing a press brief­ing in George­town on Thurs­day, Guyana's Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Dr Leslie Ram­sam­my said dis­cus­sions were held this week with Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj to push the agree­ment for­ward."We are at the be­gin­ning of a col­lab­o­ra­tion that will ben­e­fit both coun­tries," Ram­sam­my said.No fi­nan­cial in­vest­ment will be made by ei­ther gov­ern­ment but, agri­cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ties will be fa­cil­i­tat­ed in both coun­tries.

Ram­sam­my said Guyanese farm­ers pay about Guy$1,000 per acre an­nu­al­ly, de­pend­ing on the ge­o­graph­i­cal area, and based on the crop, lo­ca­tion and the size of the in­vest­ment.Sev­er­al vis­its were made and meet­ings held be­tween of­fi­cials from T&T and Guyana. As a re­sult, sev­er­al com­modi­ties were iden­ti­fied that would be best suit­ed for the land. These in­clude corn, soya, cas­sa­va, legumes, fish rear­ing and poul­try.

"We have now agreed on what this col­lab­o­ra­tion will en­tail, Trinidad will put out an ad­vi­so­ry and the in­vestors will be re­ferred to the Guyana Gov­ern­ment and the agree­ment will be fi­nalised," Min­is­ter Ram­sam­my said.

Guyana has a huge amount of land that can be used for agri­cul­ture pur­pos­es. Out­side of the 500,000 hectares that are un­der full or some cul­ti­va­tion, there is al­so the po­ten­tial for 3.3 mil­lion hectares. Ram­sam­my said that now that the com­modi­ties are iden­ti­fied, ap­pro­pri­ate land space will be con­sid­ered with­in the next two weeks. He stressed that the project will in no way af­fect small scale farm­ers but rather, they will pro­vide op­por­tu­ni­ties for them.

Ma­haraj said the project puts the two coun­tries at the peak of re­vi­tal­is­ing agri­cul­ture in the re­gion.He said T&T will be ad­ver­tis­ing for agri­cul­ture in­vestors, site vis­its will be arranged, re­quests for pro­pos­als will be so­licit­ed, and there­after eval­u­a­tions will be made by both sides be­fore fi­nal­i­sa­tion.

He ex­pressed the hope that in­vestors will seize the op­por­tu­ni­ty be­cause Trinidad has less land avail­able and Guyana of­fers many more pos­si­bil­i­ties. The prod­ucts will al­so re­quire that some pro­cess­ing fa­cil­i­ties be set up in Guyana be­fore ex­port­ing. This will al­so re­sult in more jobs op­por­tu­ni­ties be­ing cre­at­ed.

This project fol­lows through on an ini­tia­tive pro­posed by for­mer Guyana pres­i­dent Bhar­rat Jagdeo for Cari­com coun­tries to col­lab­o­rate with Guyana and ex­pand un­der­de­vel­oped agri­cul­tur­al lands. This strat­e­gy is geared to­ward re­duc­ing food im­port bills, in­creas­ing in­ter-re­gion­al food se­cu­ri­ty and re­duc­ing food in­fla­tion.