-President Jagdeo
— says country cannot wait until CARICOM is ready
GUYANA has not delayed its agriculture developmental and diversification agenda but is, in fact, looking for investments from across the world, according to President Bharrat Jagdeo.

“We are talking to the Arabs, we are talking to the Israelis, and we have released some land to the Brazilians,” the Guyanese Head-of-State said while speaking on the issue of the ‘Jagdeo Initiative on Agriculture’, at the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM)  thirty first Conference of Heads of Government underway in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Noting that the former Pirara Ranch has been split in four, President Jagdeo said: “Some of the locals have been given a portion for cassava cultivation and a European firm has been allocated another portion for the cultivation of seed rice which will be exported to Brazil and all of this is done on existing farms.”
“So I am not going to wait until CARICOM is ready, to pin all my hopes in that area,” declared President Jagdeo, a passionate promoter of agriculture in the region, even making an open offer to all CARICOM countries to take advantage of Guyana’s bountiful agricultural resources.
While highlighting the opportunities presented by Guyana for food production, and acknowledging that food prices are going to increase, causing food to become scarce, President Jagdeo said the Israelis are currently conducting feasibility studies in the intermediate savannahs of Guyana.
He referred to the Israeli initiative as a large integrated project that will cost hundreds of millions of US dollars. The projects propose to be all-inclusive, undertaking farming, processing and exporting which will form a significant sized integrated agro-complex.
The policies and programmes for the agriculture sector in CARICOM, as set out in the Jagdeo Initiative, seek to ensure that the Region’s agriculture sector is given priority in order for it to become sustainable.
The Initiative is being spearheaded by President Jagdeo, who is the Lead CARICOM Head of Government for Agriculture. CARICOM had long recognized that there were several critical elements that must be understood if agriculture was to be sustained as a viable economic sector in the Community.
These critical elements are: agriculture is a business; agriculture is holistic, spanning the entire agri-product chain and with organic links to other productive sectors; the increasing importance of value-added food products and non-food products must be recognised; emphasis on national activities with sub-regional and regional activities included when they add value to national initiatives; the Initiative must build on existing actions to reduce duplication and be the Caribbean’s response to the mandates onto which countries have signed.
Articles 56 and 57 of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas articulate the Region’s agriculture/agri-business policy goals and strategic framework for policy implementation respectively. The mandates establish the significant importance of agriculture in sustainable development in the Caribbean and provide the framework within which agriculture must be repositioned.
The Jagdeo Initiative is a practical instrument to put in motion the Regional Transformation Programme on Agriculture (RTP) or its successor, the Caribbean Community Agriculture Policy. The Initiative began in 2002 when President Jagdeo sought assistance from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Inter American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), in consultation with the CARICOM Secretariat for assistance in repositioning agriculture in the Region.
Following wider consultations, the first proposal outlining the Initiative’s vision, scope and focus and the process for its development was presented by President Jagdeo to the Conference of CARICOM Heads of Government in July 2004, which endorsed it.