Jagdeo Enterprise needs to be dumped
Kaieteur News – President is wasting his time with the Caribbean Community. Its efforts to try to promote regional food security will fail because the region’s leaders are not interested in meeting their food needs, as much as possible, from within the region.
We continue reading about Caricom’s huge food import bill. But this bill is huge because of foreign thinking and corruption.
We prefer to consume foreign brands rather than support local production. This is true throughout the Caribbean, and not just in Guyana. Go to any supermarket and look at the shelves. They are stacked with foreign goods. But that’s only half the problem. Look at the shoppers’ baskets. They are full of foreign goods although local substitutes are available.
Caribbean people prefer to eat Minute Maid rice rather than the parboiled variety produced in Guyana. They prefer Robin Hood wheat flour rather than the local brands that are produced. They prefer Cadbury to Charles in terms of chocolates. They prefer Erin Farm Ham to locally produced ham.
And in many respects, they are correct in making these choices because, regionally produced products simply do not meet the standard. Some of the toilet tissues produced in the Caribbean are very abrasive.
The quality of regional products is a problem. This is one of the failures of the Jagdeo Initiative. The Initiative failed not only because it was stopped but also because it was flawed in many ways. One of those shortcomings was its failure to link food safety to the need for more quality down the value chain, or in other words to link food safety to quality assurance in food manufacturing.
The other problem, which hinders food trade within the region, is that, for known reasons, regional officials tend to circumvent regional trade rules in order to facilitate trade in food products with other countries. Some governments will allow derogations to the regional trade rules or may go ahead and allow imports of competitive imports even though they know this is contrary to the rules of the regional treaty. Just as Guyana did years ago with cement, other regional countries are involved in food imports!
The Jagdeo Initiative, promoted by President Ali, highlighted 10 major constraints to the development of agriculture in the Caribbean. The Initiative is misconceiving a regional food security problem. The problem is not on the level of production; it is at the level of inter-regional trade in agricultural production. Production will increase once trade in regional agricultural products increases.
However, President Ali grapples with an important limitation: tariff-free barriers. It has made it clear that it is prepared to work to remove these barriers. In December last year, it announced its plans to establish a joint high level government and private sector team to explore the barriers, which impede market access to local products, particularly within Caricom.
He reported that he had asked his Ministry of Foreign Affairs to draw up a list of all the barriers to local trade. It is surprising that he should have to ask the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when he might have asked his Vice President. And even more surprising given that he is a former Minister with responsibility for commerce. Not much has changed in the five years he has been in the Opposition between 2015 and 2020.
The Jagdeo Initiative may have been approved at Heads of Government level but traction was not found in the Caribbean. The development of the strategy was outsourced to the Co-operative Institute in Agriculture (IICA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The Jagdeo Initiative was unrealistic. No one wants to come to Guyana to set up mega farms, when there is little means to get the product to regional markets. Shipping is a bugbear, which Jagdeo never bothered to fix. No one wants to come here and set up mega-farms given the level of infrastructure, which has to be installed, and its prohibitive costs. The idea of mega farms was a mega joke.
The Jagdeo Initiative was prepared by regional experts. In one of his columns, Chris Ram reported that one expert said that the Initiative was “not a perfect tool; not a piece of scholarly work; evolve; kick start and a vision and a framework for everyone. ”
The Jagdeo Enterprise did not get very far. Its pilot failed to deliver any of the main recommendations. These, which failed to get started, included a regional agricultural modernization fund, joint marketing activities and Exim-like financing. This is according to three researchers from Cave Hill, University of the West Indies.
President needs to dump Jagdeo Enterprise. It will soon be 20 years since that offer was made. It can no longer be relevant given its age and the fact that it appears to have been abandoned. Even narrowing its focus on dismantling trade barriers will not reach far. Regional governments are too isolated and unwilling to change. The obstacles will remain.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)