Guyana plans to vigorously lobby the Caribbean Community (Caricom) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations to suspend non-tarrif barriers to agricultural trade within the region, at the ongoing high level food consultation in Trinidad and Tobago.
Among Guyana’s officials and agriculturalists at the two- day forum, which opens today, is Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud.
He stressed the need to quickly remove the barriers, making it easier for producer states such as Guyana to meet the food needs of their sister countries, especially in light of the rising food prices globally.
“You can’t say you do not have the food when it is a monumental task to export food into your country right from here in the region,” the minister remarked, as he got ready to represent Guyana’s case at the forum.
This move by the Guyanese leader aims to ease intra- regional trade, especially from the burdens of stringent sanitary and phytosanitary regulations that currently almost prohibit agricultural goods from some states entering others. Even before the current food situation, Guyana had been calling on Caricom to look at these issues. With this in mind, Guyana would be seeking from all stakeholders at the twin-island republic forum agreement on a specific timeframe to remove the non- tarrif barriers and allow the intra-regional food trade to blossom.
The forum is expected to bring together 16 countries in the FAO Caribbean sub-region. These include Caricom member states, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as well as regional inter- governmental organisations, development partners, bilateral donors, research institutions, the private sector, and civil society organisations.
Additionally, Guyana would be seeking the main regional air carrier, Caribbean Airlines Limited (CAL), and other regional shipping companies to create more opportunities and accommodate greater export of agricultural commodities within the region.
The Guyanese representatives would also be calling on the Caribbean to give more attention to the “Jagdeo Initiative” (JI) and a greater sense of urgency to tackle the nine key constraints it has identified. The “JI” is a strategy document that outlines, as deterrence to agricultural repositioning in the Caribbean, inadequate new investments in agriculture, health and food safety (AHFS) systems; inadequate research and development, and a fragmented and disorganised private sector.
The other constraints include weak land and water distribution and management systems; deficient and uncoordinated risk management measures; inadequate transportation systems, particularly for perishables; weak and non-integrated information and intelligence systems; inadequate marketing arrangements, and lack of skilled and quality human resources.
Guyana believes that, if regional governments aggressively address these constraints, food production in the region would be in a better state.
After the FAO Global Food Price Index in January 2011 indicated that it had surpassed the high level reached in 2007-2008, the FAO Sub-Regional Office for the Caribbean, the Caricom Secretariat and the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) organised the Regional Consultation on Policy and Programmatic Actions to address high food prices in the Caribbean, on June 13-14.
The consultation aims to help the Caribbean Forum of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (CARIFORUM) identify options in the immediate, medium and long-term responses to the crisis. It would examine the Caricom Regional Food and Nutrition Security Policy (RFNSP) that integrates actions of the Community Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), the Caribbean Cooperation in Health (CCH) and the Community Agribusiness Strategy (CAS).
Given the broad spectrum covered under the existing policy framework for food security, stakeholders at the meeting would seek to confront the fundamental challenges related to the food import bill and high food prices. They would also examine the policy and programme thrust that would work best to address the situation of volatile food prices. In addition, there would be comparative analysis of this latest situation with that of 2007-2008, and a review of policy lessons learnt from that wave of the crisis.
The Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) stated two weeks ago that, despite the fact that annual food price inflation in Latin America and the Caribbean has been exhibiting a downward trend since the beginning of 2011, it has remained higher than inflation in general, impacting mainly the most vulnerable populations within the region.
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