— with construction of $1.7B farm-to-market road at No. 52 Village

ROADS are considered arteries to development, especially in rural, underdeveloped areas where such infrastructure could transform the entire village economy, as would be the case in No. 52 Village, Berbice, where the government plans to construct a $1.7 billion farm-to-market access road. The potential 25 kilometre road, which will run from No. 52 Village to the Canjie Creek, is expected to open close to 10,000 acres of land for farming, Minister of Agriculture, Zulfikar Mustapha has said. Agriculture has long been heralded as the backbone of Guyana’s economy, accounting for one-third of this country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and creating employment for thousands of persons nationwide.

New investments in this sector are always considered catalytic because they not only increase employment, but also provide a foundation for the building of a food secure nation.
A farm-to-market road is equally essential, in this regard, because it will encourage more persons to take up farming, and it will increase accessibility for those who are already engaged in agricultural activities. In the US, a farm-to-market road or ranch-to-market road [sometimes farm road or ranch road for short] is a state road or county road that connects rural or agricultural areas to market towns. These are better quality roads that farmers and ranchers use to transport products to market towns or distribution centres.
Various studies have proven that road infrastructure is the backbone of many rural and urban transport systems.

Rural transport provides assurance for the supply of the agricultural inputs and facilitates the delivery of farm outputs to the markets. Farmers who have access to the bigger markets, on average, produce high crop yield. Such will be the case in the No. 52 Village, Minister Mustapha said, adding that the Cabinet has already given the “green light” for the design and construction of a farm-to-market road there. “It will open up about 10,000 acres of land, plus improve the existing cultivation because they [farmers] will have proper access,” the minister said during a telephone interview with the Guyana Chronicle, on Thursday. This announcement follows the turning of the sod for the construction of a five-kilometre asphaltic farm-to-market road at Onverwagt, West Coast Berbice. It was reported that with the construction of this $327 million road, over 30,000 acres of rice will be cultivated, while 60 cattle farmers with a total of 23,000 heads of cattle and about 1,000 heads of small ruminants, will also benefit directly.

OTHER REGIONS
The benefits experienced by those farmers will soon accrue to other persons in Regions One, Two, Three, Five and Six, where the government plans to construct more farm-to-market roads.
Minister Mustapha anticipates that, before the year is out, six farm-to-market roads will be constructed in those regions. “These will help to open up more lands, and I am looking to ensure that I double production in rice, among other things,” the minister said. Aside from infrastructural development, the government, over the next five years, will be looking to implement measures in the agricultural sector, geared at diversifying the economy, creating more jobs and increasing farmers’ incomes. To provide relief to “struggling farmers,” the authorities have reversed land-lease fees, land taxes and drainage and irrigation fees to 2014 rates. The government has also removed the value added tax (VAT) from fertilisers, agro-chemicals and pesticides.
Those “business-friendly” measures will afford farmers the opportunity to position themselves for potential growth in the agricultural sector.  There is already growing interest in Guyana’s non-traditional crops overseas, as export volumes of non-traditional crops have increased due to the agriculture export diversification initiatives (AEDP).

This programme was designed to promote certain crops for the local market and to target the export market, particularly the CARICOM market. Among the crops promoted were the 4Ps (peppers, plantains, pineapples and pumpkin) and the 4Cs (Coconut, citrus, cassava, carrots).
For years, Guyana’s ‘potential’ to become the breadbasket of the Caribbean has been under the spotlight and while the rhetoric has outweighed action on this front, the country will be looking to realise its potential in the coming years, with immediate focus on tapping at least 15 per cent of the close to US$6 billion regional food import bill.
Most of the commodities, which form part of this huge bill, are sourced from the “developed world” while Guyana, a member state of the CARICOM, has the potential to supply a sizeable amount of those commodities. It was reported that 10 commodities – food preparations, wheat, rice, chicken, non-alcoholic beverages, maize, soya bean, sugar and palm oil — account for more than 40 per cent of CARICOM’s food import bill. Immediately, based on this list, Guyana has the potential to supply rice, sugar and poultry, among many other things.