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CARIBBEAN: Leaders Seek Funds to Transform Agriculture

Peter Ischyrion

PORT OF SPAIN, Jun 8 2007 (IPS) - Convinced that agriculture holds the key to the socioeconomic development of the Caribbean, regional leaders have drawn up a project list totaling almost 300 million dollars for regional and international donors to help transform the sector.

The 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) governments submitted a total of 53 packages to the first ever Caribbean agriculture donor conference held here last weekend, organised jointly by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Guyana-based CARICOM Secretariat.

FAO Director General Jacques Diouf said that at least 200 million dollars would be needed from external sources to kick-start the initiative.

“Together we can overcome hunger and poverty in the region,” Diouf said. “But the financial constraints imposed by inadequate national budgets and the high indebtedness of many countries of the region call for a greater commitment of external donors in a concerted effort to achieve the financial objective.”

Conference sources told IPS that recommendations for the way forward include the convening of an investment forum that would bring together all stakeholders. They said that by the time the forum is held – no date has yet been given – a “matching of needs and resources would have been accomplished”.

Government financing has traditionally been the backbone of the development of the regional agricultural sector, but since the 1980s, when most Caribbean countries were faced with IMF-imposed structural adjustment programmes, public investments declined significantly.

“The hope was that the private sector would have intervened to fill the investment and services gaps. This assumption is one of the main failures of international financial institution policy directed at developing countries,” Clyde Mascoll, the junior finance minister from Barbados, told delegates.

“In a revision of their own policy approaches, these institutions now fully recognise the critical synergies between public sector and private sector investment. One without the other has much less chance of success. When their investment is complementary, both the public and the private sector investments have greater returns,” he added.

In the package of proposals submitted to donors, regional officials stressed the strengthening of “strategic alliances” with organisations such as the Jamaica Agricultural Development Foundation, the Belize Livestock Producers Association, and the Grenada Cooperative Nutmeg Association.

Faced with an annual food import bill of about 2 billion dollars, Caribbean governments are also well aware of the need to diversify the agricultural sector and increase productivity and competitiveness.

“We must participate effectively in a variety of agricultural product markets where the costs of competing have increased, and therefore investments to establish larger and stronger enterprises is required,” said Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo, who has primary responsibility for agriculture within CARICOM.

He said in the past, regional governments had conducted studies on the agricultural sector that were “focused on guiding our trade negotiators either to retain preferential markets or to use in the trade negotiations in the different theaters we are involved in at this point in time.”

“Very little had been done on production,” he said, noting that the primary objective was to “achieve food security and to have a competitive agricultural export product”.

The package of proposals submitted to the donors addresses a number of areas, including the development and transfer of technology, improvement of infrastructure, developing markets for value added products as well as strengthening food safety systems, quality and standards.

“The support we are going to ask of you is not investment support in the agricultural sector,” Jagdeo said. “We are going to ask you to assist us to create the enabling environment for the private sector.”

“We are going to ask you to assist us to put in place the physical infrastructure, the policy infrastructure and the incentive regimes that are necessary to stimulate the private sector investment into this sector,” he said.

Mascoll said it was also necessary to invest in the agricultural sector as part of the social responsibility to create jobs for those in the rural areas wanting to work.

While the region has been working on upgrading its technological capacity, it has not sustained that effort, he said, “and there are too many examples across the region where research stations are a shadow of what they were two decades ago.

“Worse, while the traditional production technology work is still to be done, there are a whole host of new technology challenges upon us (that include) meeting the food safety and quality standards, deciding on the role of biotechnology, incorporating new information technologies into our technology development and transfer system.”

But these are not the only issues confronting Caribbean agriculture.

Host Prime Minister Patrick Manning noted that while Caribbean countries were seeking to ensure food security and safety, their efforts were being hampered by the stance taken by some countries at various international forums.

“We therefore seriously lament the lack of progress in the stalled (World Trade Organisation) DOHA round of multilateral trade negotiations which has placed development as its core objective and which is consequently of utmost importance to the developing countries,” he said.

“The fact is agriculture continues to be the main obstacle to progress in the talks, as the protectionist policies in this sector of some major countries run counter to the liberalised regimes they are advocating in almost all other areas,” Manning said in reference to the billions of dollars in government subsidies handed out by the United States and European Union to their own farmers, undermining the competitiveness of developing nations.

“We have a situation of apparently entrenched stagnation which has defied periodic attempts to jump-start the process. Whilst negotiations languish in this comatose state, the agricultural sector is dying in a great many countries of the developed world,” he said.