— Minister Mustapha calls on more organisations to get involved in agriculture

AGRICULTURE Minister Zulfikar Mustapha on Sunday visited the Plaisance Seventh-Day Adventist Church to discuss developing the church’s agricultural programme.

According to a release, members of the church’s leadership recently met with Minister Mustapha at his office seeking the ministry’s guidance in developing a section of their compound for agricultural purposes.

During the engagement, Minister Mustapha told the members that he was elated to know that organisations were taking the initiative to get involved in agriculture. He further stated that when religious and other private and public organisations get involved in agriculture, Guyana will be able to play its part in ensuring regional food security.

“I want to commend the members for taking this step. You’ve shown interest in developing an initiative that is new in many organisations. When we speak about agriculture, many persons only relate those activities to persons in the fields or the farming communities, but if we can have persons emulating what is being done here, then Guyana can remain food-secure. Even taking it further, with these efforts, we can move closer to achieving Vision 25 by 2025,” he explained.

The release noted that Minister Mustapha encouraged the membership to include the youth arm of the church in the project.

“When we think about agriculture, we see it as a labour-intensive job for older folks. Now, with the technological advances in the sector, younger people are expressing an interest and coming on board. Here is your opportunity to integrate your youth groups into the project so that they too can understand the importance of agriculture to our country’s and the region’s development and growth,” he said.

Alison Wilson-Hetsberger, one of the church’s directors, said given the emphasis being placed on developing Guyana’s agricultural sector and the government’s call for organisations to get involved, the leadership decided to utilise some of the lands it had available to develop an agricultural programme.

“Plaisance would’ve answered the call of the President and the Minister (of Agriculture) to get involved in agriculture. We planned a project and began the process of putting together a proposal to commence our shadehouse project. We’ve already commenced part of the process and received assistance in the form of virtual training from NAREI. We also partnered with the UNDP to get this project going. We are happy that the minister is here and look forward to partnering with the ministry to get this project going,” she explained.

After assessing the available land space, Minister Mustapha told the members present that teams from the ministry will be returning to the site during the week to see what is needed and develop a plan of action to move the process forward.

Also present at the meeting were MoA’s Director-General, Madanlall Ramraj; CEO (ag) of GLDA, Dr Dwight Waldron; CEO of NAREI, Jagnarine Singh; MoA’s Chief Technical Officer, George Jervis; the Chief Fisheries Officer, Denzil Roberts; New GMC’s Senior Marketing Officer, Asraf Narine; and other officials from the GLDA and NAREI, the release said.