Minister Mustapha’s ‘take’ on regional agri investment

It would have been more than a little reassuring if the recent remark attributed to Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha regarding what he sees as the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) readiness for investments in the agriculture sector could have been accepted as a given. That remark was made at a recent virtual forum in which he was joined by CARICOM Assistant Secretary-General for Trade and Economic Integration Joseph Cox. It was intended to be a prelude to the upcoming agriculture expo here in Guyana.

Unfortunately, and since the rest of the Caribbean has sent no signal whatsoever of such readiness, Minister Mustapha’s remark is likely to be seen against the backdrop of what has become a proclivity among Guyanese political functionaries (perhaps the same is true elsewhere in the region) for waxing ‘fast and loose’ in both their pronouncements and their undertakings, their focus being, mostly on seizing the political moment. They have not been, all too frequently, anywhere near as good at, first, diligently probing the veracity of their pronouncements before making them nor, in the majority in instances, following through on them. These pronouncements are usually all about sound bite, giving the media something to report… nothing more. What Minister Mustapha had to say is certainly not without precedent on all sides of the political divide here in Guyana.

Over time, thousands of similar pronouncements/declarations have come and gone… nowhere.

The fact that Minister Mustapha is still relatively new to government does not mean that he should be given a ‘free pass’ here. Politicians need to understand that nowhere within the ‘burden’ of the authority with which they are vested is the prerogative to make utterances that do not make it past newspaper headlines.

Any number of such ‘promises’ that have to do with upping the region’s food security status have been made by our politicians. Guyana almost certainly tops the list of CARICOM countries from whence such pronouncements have come. They usually have their origins mostly in CARICOM high-level and highly over-rated Heads of Government consultations on the subject of food security. These are followed by ‘activity’ involving ‘experts’ under CARICOM’s umbrella, which, in the overwhelming number of cases, go nowhere in terms of responding to the challenges which the experts have been mandated to tackle. None of these ‘excursions’ have come even close to being a success, a truism manifested in the continual climbing of the region’s food import bill and the repetitive and, frankly, pointless expressions of concern about the problem.

To return to the issue of the Minister of Agriculture’s pronouncement about the region being ready for investments in agriculture, it would be interesting to learn which tea leaves he would have read before arriving at that position. The arrival at a collective position on resultsdriven investment in raising the agricultural profile of the Caribbean has to derive from a carefully created plan that not only takes account of the objective circumstances in each member country but also benefits from a ‘buy in’ from member countries. These must make their own individual determinations on that issue and that, as far as we are aware, has not happened.

The objectives of a meaningful regional food security plan are sufficiently important to cause its conceptualisation to be attended by experts in disciplines that go beyond agriculture, per se, and afterwards, validated (or otherwise) through some kind of reliable testing process. They must not derive from what, frequently, are the fertile minds of politicians mostly preoccupied with audience impact.

The region’s current preoccupation with the issue of food security has been significantly accentuated by the much wider global food security hype that has come in the wake of the economic challenges arising mostly out of the impact of COVID-19 on global agriculture and agro-processing. One expects that the forthcoming discourses at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre which, we are told, involves both experts and a few CARICOM Heads, will seek to ventilate and hopefully determine definitively whether Minister Mustapha’s pronouncement is valid or otherwise.

It is not often that we witness CARICOM fora of any kind which move seamlessly from concrete decisions to the creation and effective implementation of clear road maps for actualisation.