The Minister of Food Production in T&T has been encouraging farmers to increase production and this with a billion-dollar food import bill in mind. In Jamaica, Prime Minister Bruce Golding recently claimed that if farmers in his country were to produce food to their full potential, there would be an over-supply at home as the internal market is simply too small to consume what would be produced. Undoubtedly that would be the same situation in Guyana, if the lands of the continental Caribbean country (83,000 sq miles) are fully utilised to produce food. Next-door Suriname (67,000 sq miles) would bring further productive capacity into the business of food production. If production on the arable agricultural lands of the two giant South American-Caribbean territories, along with Jamaica and T&T, was to be combined with the essentially agricultural economies of the Eastern Caribbean, food in large quantities and varieties would be abundant in the region. That in itself would be a major boon in these times of food security, rising international prices, the projections of a shortage of water resources, and large expenditure of scarce foreign exchange on imported food into the region.
But in addition to securing food for the eight million or so consumers in the Caricom region, such large-scale production must require a measure of sophistication to it. First of all, to avoid the inevitable period of gluts and scarcity, agro-industrial production would preserve food in the gluts and make it available in off-production periods. It would also be seeking to break the historical pattern of Caribbean economies producing and selling raw materials while having to purchase its own agricultural products which would have been processed abroad. Ultimately, of course, there would be the need to export both raw and processed food to the large consumer markets of the North. It is accepted that breaking into the farmers' markets of developed countries is not going to be an easy task; if it were, it would have been done already en masse by developing countries. At present, a new international trade agreement has been stalled for a number of years, with access to the food markets of the developed world being a major problem. Nonetheless, that is the real world of the 21st century and Caricom member states need to learn to live and prosper in it. Producing food on a regional basis and in so doing utilising the varied resources to the best benefit of all is a long-established goal of Caricom and the Single Market and Economy. As indicated above, major Caricom states are facing massive food import bills that absorb large chunks of vital and short foreign currency. Moreover, in many Caricom states, options for earning foreign currency are receding.
Along with making state lands available for farming, which we know to be a difficult proposition in a land-short country such as ours, governments have to construct and enhance the agricultural infrastructure needed. Financing agricultural production is a problem of how the financial systems in the Caribbean have been constructed. In order to drive the modernisation and financing of agricultural production, the Faculty of Science and Agriculture at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies would need to be upgraded and given a research agenda to drive the production required.
The key would be to ensure that younger, more technically proficient farmers are provided with the intellectual tools, the scientific and extension support, adequate access to soft loans and crop insurance and, more than anything, policymakers who are responsive to the requirements of the agricultural sector.
Caribbean countries need to move pass the stage of hand-wringing and the repetitive definition of problems as if many solutions have not already been recommended to tackle the region's problems. Along with the governments of the region, the private sector must also see options that require it to get involved in production, processing and financing agriculture.
