Trinidad and Tobago’s Finance Minister Larry Howai on Monday announced in his budget presentation, that 10,000 acres of land in Guyana will be made available for use by local farmers under the terms of a new facility to be administered by the ministry of food production.
The facility is the result of the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Guyana government. Under the facility, investors will be able to apply to the ministry of food production for licence to use the lands in Guyana.
These applications are to be made in the form of business proposals, which will be evaluated by the ministry. The land must be used for the purposes of food production and to address demand for food locally.
It is expected that the initial amount of land to be made available will be 10,000 acres but this could be increased to 100,000 acres.
In the 2013 Budget, Howai had noted that steps were being taken to establish such a facility.
“The ministry of food production, with agricultural land becoming less and less available in Trinidad and Tobago, is moving to establish a Food Security Facility with the government of Guyana,” Howai said.
“The Facility would commit both governments to expanding agricultural production in Guyana through the establishment of commercial relationships for funding the establishment of several large agricultural estates in Guyana,” the minister added.
Win-win situation
Meanwhile, Guyana’s Agriculture Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy said Monday the investment by TT farmers in food production in Guyana will “be a win-win situation, not only for Trinidad and Tobago, but for Guyana and the entire Caribbean.”
Ramsammy told TT media by telephone from Georgetown, that the provision of arable lands in Guyana is consistent with the “Jagdeo Initiative” which invites Caricom nationals to invest in agriculture to ensure food security and reduce the region’s high food import bill.
TT’s annual food import bill is pegged at US$4 billion. The areas under discussion, Ramsammy said, are for aqua-culture, and the production of rice, vegetables, and livestock. TT’s annual fish import bill, he said, is in the region of US$100 million.
Jagdeo Initiative at work
The Jagdeo Initiative takes its name from Guyana’s former President Bharrat Jagdeo, who in 2003 as lead head of government for Agriculture in Caricom, proposed that Guyana will make available lands for farming to any Caricom national willing to invest in food production to create a more competitive and sustainable agricultural sector in the region by 2015. Over the past year, Ramsammy said that technical teams from TT have visited Guyana to assess the potential and situation on the ground. What the investors would want to produce, he said, would determine where the investment would be located.
Apart from the production of rice, he said that one or two TT investors are also interested in the production of corn and soya as stock for livestock and poultry feeds. Because the mechanisms were not in place, he said the investments are still pending. If the region can produce its own corn and soya for stock feeds, he said that the price of poultry and livestock will also reduce.
In the same way the Simpson family of Barbados in 2011 invested initially in 10,000 acres in Guyana, and has this year taken an additional 20,000 acres, Ramsammy said the acreage will be increased incrementally to 100,000 acres for TT investment. The Simpson family investment at Santa Fe in the Rupununi is in rice, cassava, corn and soya. All are for export. (Excerpt from TT Newsday)
