With international support…
A HISTORIC three-day symposium opened here yesterday to deliberate on agriculture risk insurance and formulate a management strategy to protect vulnerable farmers from climate related loss.

Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud, addressing the first such forum in Guyana, at the Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, Georgetown, said an innovative financial mechanism is a crucial milestone for building a competitive, sustainable and dynamic sector that will positively impact local, regional and global food security.

Alluding to a recent United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report, he said world population will surpass nine billion by 2050.

In that context, Mr. Persaud told the gathering, inclusive of World Bank Representative, Mr. Renzo de la Riva Aguero; Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) Operation and Integration Director for the Caribbean Region, Mr. Trevor Murray; United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) local representative, Dr Lystra Fletcher-Paul, commercial bankers, other credit providers, farmers, officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and the region, that, to feed the additional 2.4 billion, food supply will have to increase by 70 per cent.

He said, according to the compilation, climate change will add its own challenges, notably rising sea levels will take away massive amounts of fertile land, intensive rain will put pressure on existing infrastructure and seasonal flooding may become a regular feature.

In addition, Persaud said raised temperatures will reduce crop yields and increase plant pests and diseases, making the case that food security, poverty and climate change are inextricably linked.

He said the local agriculture sector provides close to 30 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), around half of the total export earnings and directly employs a third of the country’s labour force.

Further, there is a large potential for expansion, given Guyana’s comparative advantage, regarding its unexploited natural resources.

SEA LEVELS
But, Persaud said the majority of the population and agricultural enterprises are concentrated along the low-lying coastal belt in the North of the country, which is prone to the effects of rising sea levels and intense rainfall, underscoring the need for risk management.

“Risk management in this environment has become a sine qua non and needs to include wide-ranging measures for adaptation to climate change, climate change mitigation, target measures to protect the most vulnerable, education and training all the way through to the introduction of new and innovative financial instruments such as crop insurance,” he posited.

Persaud said Guyana has to look at innovative ways to reduce the sources of risk in its agriculture sector, through training and education in best crop and livestock husbandry practices, extension services or the development and transfer of various scientific and technological solutions in research.

“We expect the development of crop insurance to play a significant part within that strategy and, alongside other measures such as a well defined public sector support framework, it will shield farmers from extreme fluctuations in incomes, provide new investors the incentives to invest, reduce the barrier to access credit and thus support further investment flowing to the sector, while contributing towards the stability, competitiveness and dynamism of our sector.

“The introduction of such innovative financial mechanisms has been proven to bring real tangible rewards in a number of countries around the globe,” he noted.

At the regional level, Persaud said risk management has been identified as a key area under the Jagdeo Initiative for the transformation of regional agriculture and, even though a lot more needs to be done, the creation of the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) is laudable.

BINDING CONSTRAINTS
Murray said one of the key binding constrains of the Jagdeo Initiate is the inadequate agriculture risk management in the region and made a strong plea for the development of an integrated and coordinated approach to deal with the issue, including innovative agriculture insurance instruments as risk mitigation facility.

He said IICA, in this regard, has given its full support in several areas, notably in the publication, in 2006, of a paper titled ‘Managing hazard, reducing risks and increasing investment in agriculture- some perspectives’.

Murray said, when Minister Persaud sought the support of his agency on the prospects of Guyana establishing an agriculture insurance and credit scheme, his request was promptly answered.

The IICA delegate said a one day fact finding mission was mounted, with key private and public sector stakeholders here while an overseas agriculture insurance company was contracted to visit Guyana.

Murray reported that the company revived the legal and regulatory framework for agriculture and submitted a report and other recommendations to Minister Persaud and the symposium is a follow-up towards realisation of the scheme.

The Ministry of Agriculture initiative was organised by IICA, in collaboration with the World Bank.