Agribusiness Outlook: IICA's National Consultation

This Consultation took place at the Michel Eldon Complex, College of The Bahamas (COB).

The following document entitled "Background To Regional Agricultural Policy Workshop on Developing Policies and Proposals For Alleviating Key Binding Constraints To Agriculture In The Caribbean," was the outcome of a workshop organized by the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Corporation (CTA).

Part I

Context:

Agriculture has been a critical building block of all Caribbean economies, in terms of its contribution to gross national output, foreign exchange earnings and employment.

However, in recent years, in several countries of the Caribbean, its economic performance has been characterized by a marked unevenness and a failure to attain a steady growth pattern. Export agriculture has been in crisis; precipitated by the deterioration in traditional industries due to adjustment difficulties related to trade liberalization and commodity market price volatility; and instability in others, such as, citrus, coffee, cocoa and spices, due to severe competitive pressures and a proliferation of stringent product and process standards in developed countries. The food production sector, which generally performed better, has been faced with increasing competition in the domestic markets as the process of globalization and trade liberalization progresses.

These recent experiences in agriculture suggest that policy formulation and consequent programme implementation have been key constraints in the transformation of agriculture in the region.

Regional policy makers have repeatedly emphasized that domestic agriculture is largely responsive to external stimuli. In response to this, and the changing economic environment, Caribbean countries are engaged in the process of adjusting and reorienting their agricultural and rural development policies to better equip the sector to meet this new paradigm for the 21st Century. Consequently, policy change, strong and practical policies must be prerequisites for the agricultural adjustment and repositioning process.

President of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo, lead Head for Agriculture within the CARICOM Conference of Heads of Government (CHoG) recognized that the response for agriculture by our States, singly and collectively, requires major adjustments.

Such adjustment should lead to marked improvements in how we engage, support and finance the business of agriculture, including how we organize our supply base, market our products and procure our inputs. These have significant policy implications for our Ministers of Agriculture and our entire Cabinets at the national levels, as well as for the CHoG and the Forum of Ministers of Agriculture at the regional level.

This initiative, facilitated by the Alliance for the Sustainable Development of Agriculture and the Rural Milieu in the Caribbean (The Alliance [1]) and the CTA/IICA-supported Caribbean Region Agricultural Policy Network (CaRAPN) [2] is therefore fully complementary to the CARICOM Regional Transformation Program (RTP) for Agriculture. It seeks to facilitate agriculture's decisive move from the crossroads that it currently finds itself into bold action to reposition its industries, enterprises and peoples along a path of sustainable and equitable growth.

As part of that repositioning process, the CHoG mandated countries, supported by development organizations working in agriculture within the region, to identify and develop a package of initiatives to address the three or four most binding constraints to a dynamic and competitive agricultural sector in all member states of the region. The identification of these constraints has emerged from a region-wide process of ongoing national consultations. The framework for the conduct of these national consultations was developed by the Facilitators Briefing Meeting held in Trinidad and Tobago from September 30 to October 01.

This regional policy workshop is thus convened to take these national outputs a step further in the process of developing the framework, of the supportive actions required at the regional level, for agricultural repositioning.

3.1 CONTEXT OF THE COUNTRY REPORTS

Within the framework of the Alliance for Sustainable Development of Agriculture and the Rural Life Milieu, IICA in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the CARICOM Secretariat, sought to facilitate consultations and dialogue at national and regional levels towards fulfilling the implementation of the mandates of the Jagdeo initiative.

These mandates seek to determine firm proposals for regional action aimed at alleviating the three or four most binding constraints to national agriculture sector growth initiatives.

To initiate this process, a Technical Briefing Meeting (30 September - 01 October, 2004) was held to inform Member States of the Jagdeo initiative, to get consensus on the information required to facilitate fulfilment of the objectives of this initiative, and bearing in mind that some countries have already undertaken national consultations, to determine the scope and nature of further consultation and dialogue in countries.

With respect to fulfilling the immediate requirements of the Jagdeo initiative, a two-pronged approach to obtaining this result in a relatively short space of time.

Firstly, a short-term fast-tracked process to facilitate the urgent identification and prioritization of critical issues and binding constraints to agricultural transformation at the national level.

This would form the basis of shaping a regional response. Secondly, the long-term process with a focus on nurturing of national mechanisms to foster systematic consultations among all stakeholders on a regular basis.

Emerging from this process would be the identification of strategic issues for the development of the sector, with built-in short-term mechanisms for review and re-orientation as necessary.

In some of the countries, such as Belize, Barbados, St. Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago, their current national strategy is the result of the conclusions from recent series of national and sub-regional consultations. In such cases the process recommended by the Briefing Meeting may not have been as intensive, but served to adjust them and harmonize them with the desired outputs of the process being pursued. In countries where these strategies still do not exist or need to be revised, the process will present an excellent starting point for constructing them.

The countries were asked to focus their results on the following major areas:

1)What are the major growth opportunities in agriculture (food & non-food industries) that could be a basis for feasible and viable areas for investment?

2)What are the core/key binding constraints to capitalizing on these opportunities at the level of the producer/processor, state (government) and the region?

3)What are the critical actions/facilitating arrangements required by the producer, processor, state (government) and the region to minimize/alleviate these constraints?