CARICOM chairman says interest in agriculture dwindling across the region
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| Published on Monday, November 16, 2009 |
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GEORGETOWN, Guyana -- Chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo, who is also responsible for Agriculture in the Quasi Cabinet of the regional grouping, believes policy makers are losing sight of the importance of agriculture in ensuring regional food security.
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| Guyana President Bharrat Jagdeo. AFP PHOTO |
Jagdeo, addressing a media conference on Friday before departing for United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) World Food Summit in Rome, said the agriculture sector in the Caribbean “simply cannot move forward unless there is the political will to do so.”
The president, who is the creator of the Jagdeo Initiative on Agriculture for CARICOM, believes there must be concrete policies in place, incentives and budgetary allocations for drainage and irrigation, and research and development in order for the region to have a solid agriculture sector to meet its food demand and capitalize on export opportunities in the context of the world food crisis.
“Unless we do these things, it will be just talk,” he said, noting that the plan is meant to ease the region’s hefty US$3 billion annual food importation bill.
The CARICOM chairman said there is no evidence of a concerted intent from some of the countries to moving the plan forward save for Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica who have been pushing forward with their agriculture.
Jagdeo is concerned that the momentum of pushing the sector forward, as seen during the food crisis, has dwindled after the return to lower food prices in late 2008 early 2009.
Jagdeo said the Caribbean “has a huge potential to feed itself, but we must see this as a priority… we don’t want that in 20 years time when the region’s demand for food will grow by 50 percent driven by supply and demand factors that we in this region don’t have food for our children although we have money to buy the food.”
Jagdeo will be taking the support of the Caribbean to the World Food Summit where he plans to push the region’s agriculture initiative forward and seek support from the FAO.
“We have to meet in Rome to try to revive focus on agriculture…at the meeting, we will be asking for more resources and more coherence on policy," he said.
Jagdeo met with the FAO Director- General Jacques Diouf during the United Nations General Assembly in September, where he was invited as the CARICOM Representative to the summit where Diouf asked for the Caribbean ’s support for the summit.
Jagdeo recalled that in a presentation to the CARICOM heads of government during the height of the food crisis, Diouf had urged the leaders to support the FAO programme.
“We were at that time reeling from the world food crisis and we thought it very important that the world got together to coordinate action on food security," Jagdeo said.
He added that the summit also will focus not only on growing more food, but also on fair trading practices. | | | | Reads : 738 | | | |
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