Fol­low­ing three days of re­gion­al col­lab­o­ra­tion, the Agri-In­vest­ment Fo­rum and Ex­po has con­clud­ed. But Pro­fes­sor Dr Wayne Gan­pat, for­mer Dean of the Fac­ul­ty of Food and Agri­cul­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, has called for more fo­cus on do­mes­tic food pro­duc­tion.

The for­mer UWI Dean told Guardian Me­dia dur­ing an in­ter­view, that while he lauds the need for col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween this coun­try and its re­gion­al coun­ter­parts—name­ly Guyana, he said those in au­thor­i­ty must look at the agri­cul­ture sec­tor do­mes­ti­cal­ly to en­sure sta­ble food mar­kets.

“There had been sev­er­al at­tempts be­fore to get food pro­duc­ing re­gion­al­ly in Guyana and oth­er coun­tries, in­clud­ing Suri­name and Be­lize. I think this is the third ef­fort and I re­al­ly wish this will be suc­cess­ful... but coun­tries should not leave their do­mes­tic food pro­duc­tion be­hind,” Pro­fes­sor Gan­pat said.

He added, “We need large quan­ti­ties of land, which Guyana and Suri­name have. Trinidad farm­ers can pro­duce all the veg­eta­bles we want, the fresh fruit mar­ket and even some root crops, but you need the land for pas­ture, you need land for tree crops, for the val­ue-added. And then on the oth­er hand, who is go­ing to do the val­ue-added, are we go­ing to put it in the hands of a few large val­ue-added com­pa­nies?”

With the Gov­ern­ment’s plan to re­duce the food im­port bill by 25 per cent by 2025, Pro­fes­sor Gan­pat lauds this at­tempt.

He, how­ev­er, sug­gest­ed this be done with a greater fo­cus on lo­cal food pro­duc­tion.

“There has been very lit­tle ef­fort over the years to sup­port do­mes­tic pro­duc­tion of food, across sev­er­al gov­ern­ments. Farm­ers are cry­ing out to us for seeds, re­duc­tion in prices for fer­tilis­ers, new seeds. Now giv­en what I heard, the Prime Min­is­ter said that you need to ramp up the tech­nolo­gies and sup­port them. The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies fac­ul­ty for agri­cul­ture have to have all the tech­nolo­gies. It is just the in­vest­ment to get it go­ing and peo­ple to fund us to do it be­yond the class­room and in­to the fields, but we have the tech­nolo­gies for green­house agri­cul­ture, we have the tech­nolo­gies for fish­ing hous­es, we have tech­nolo­gies for do­ing pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture, val­ue-added.”

He con­tin­ued, “We can­not leave alone do­mes­tic pro­duc­tion of food. We need to sup­port our farm­ers whether it is at the same time go­ing to Guyana, we are go­ing to be leav­ing a large per­cent­age—100,000 peo­ple or more liveli­hoods on the bread­line.”

Pro­fes­sor Dr Gan­pat said he hopes this coun­try does not re­ly too heav­i­ly on any one coun­try again, as this could even­tu­al­ly lead to more prob­lems.

“I’m al­so con­cerned that we’re re­al­ly talk­ing a lot about Guyana. If you re­mem­ber, Trinidad could have fed it­self. When the oil in­dus­try came in, every­body ex­it­ed the agri­cul­ture sec­tor, go­ing to the oil in­dus­try. So, I’m watch­ing on the hori­zon that Guyana, why are we putting a lot of ef­fort in­to Guyana, a lot of mon­ey on in­vest­ment? Guyana is on the verge of be­com­ing an­oth­er en­er­gy econ­o­my. If per­chance wages rise in the en­er­gy sec­tor peo­ple are prob­a­bly go­ing to leave the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor, that is proven in the the­o­ry, peo­ple will leave the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor and go in­to the en­er­gy sec­tor and what will be our out­come, we would be right back to where we are. So we need to di­ver­si­fy, spread it across a cou­ple of oth­er coun­tries in the re­gion and fix it on do­mes­tic pro­duc­tion.”