H.E. President Bharat Jagdeo has driven many initiatives, expanding on his portfolio as president of Guyana, to address issues that would affect borders, and humanity, beyond Guyana.

The growing concerns of food security in the world, especially in light of the difficulty being faced by the United Nations in meeting its commitment to halving world hunger by 2015, at a time when there are an estimated 800 million hungry people across the globe, is a stark reminder of the inequity between the rich and the impoverished nations.

Even worse are the nations that are blessed with enough resources to comfortably feed their own people, except for the uneven distribution of the wealth, many times aided and exacerbated by an uncaring and oftentimes despotic leader.

So it is within this context that one must judge the role Guyana’s Government is playing in empowering farmers and creating an enabling culture that has placed Guyana’s agricultural sector on the front burner, and the attempt by President Jagdeo to address the issue of food security in CARICOM is evocative of the PPP’s commitment to regional integration, especially as adumbrated by the CSME.

The Jagdeo Initiative on Agriculture is a strategy for removing constraints to the development of agriculture in the Caribbean. It builds upon past regional efforts to develop a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and identifies ten key binding constraints faced by the sector.

Agriculture has been in decline in the Caribbean for some years, with persons moving out of the sector and with preferential market access removed for many of the Region’s agricultural products.

At the same time, the Caribbean’s extra-regional food import bill has been growing steadily, which consequently impacts negatively on the capacity of nation states within the CARICOM bloc to address their social services issues.

In 2002, President Jagdeo proposed to a Caribbean Heads of Government Conference that the Region should build on its past efforts to develop a Common Agricultural Policy. He stressed that in the changed global environment, the “agricultural sector was neither providing for food security nor earning the foreign exchange to cover the Caribbean’s growing food import bill.”

The President called upon the Inter-American Institute for Co-operation in Agriculture (IICA) and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to assist in developing a repositioning strategy for agriculture in the region.

Consequently, IICA prepared a Situation and Outlook Report for Agriculture and Rural Life in the Caribbean. This report was endorsed by Ministers of Agriculture in 2004 and became the “first step for repositioning of agriculture and preparation of the initial proposal for the Jagdeo Initiative itself.”

In July 2004, at the Caribbean Heads of Government conference in Grenada, President Jagdeo presented a paper entitled “A Framework for the Repositioning of Caribbean Agriculture”. In this Framework he stressed the need for a Regional Policy and Strategy for strengthening food security and alleviating poverty.

The Framework was presented in the context of the CARICOM Regional Transformation Program (RTP) for Agriculture in Chapter V of the Revised Treaty establishing the Caribbean Community, which is “a basis for elaborating national and regional strategic policy and plans to accelerate agricultural transformation, growth and development”. In the presentation, he listed the key element of the framework and outlined the requirements that would make regional agriculture globally competitive.

Yesterday, the re-established farmers’ body, Guyana Agricultural Farmers’ Association (GAPA), held a stakeholders’ meeting in collaboration with the Caribbean Farmers’ Network (CaFAN) under the auspices of Guyana’s Agriculture Ministry as part of this Government’s continuum of efforts in integrating with its sister states within CARICOM to promote the agricultural sector within the region.

GAPA’s sister agricultural agency, the Guyana Rice Producers’ Association (RPA), is a founding member of CaFAN.

The Jagdeo Initiative on Agriculture is one more strategizing mechanism being driven by our very caring President to ensure and enhance food security and the general well-being, not only in Guyana, but in our neighbouring states as well.