Home  News Regional News Food production important to Guyana’s future
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Food production important to Guyana’s future |
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Friday, 25 July 2008 |
GEORGETOWN - Guyana's current 'Grow More Food' campaign is part of a larger strategy to help secure the country's future, President Bharrat Jagdeo reiterated Saturday night.
"Our children are going to grow up into a world that will see increasing shortages. They will face a bigger challenge than the one we face today and if we’re not careful, in the next 30 years, wars would be fought because of the shortage of food around the world.
"It is expected that by 2030 that global demands of food will double. This will double because of changing diets and growing populations. And at the same time the world’s food supplies are dwindling," Jagdeo told a public forum.
Jagdeo said Guyana and the wider Caribbean want to protect future generations from likely food shortages and unpredictable global weather patterns and are currently implementing appropriate policy initiatives to guarantee this.
"We have seen a change in the weather pattern, we are more prone to adverse weather conditions and the sea is rising and because of the peculiarities of our country, this poses a significant threat to our way of life. But if this continues and there’s just a two percentage point increase in climate…if the weather were to increase by that, then countries like ours would not be able to continue to grow the crops we’re growing because it would become too hot," he explained.
"This agriculture drive presents an opportunity for many of our young people. Many of us today see agriculture as just tilling the land but there are so many opportunities in the agricultural sector from research and development to marketing to actual agriculture, to the supply of inputs into the agricultural sector, it’s a whole value chain and we have to ensure that our children find opportunities in this value chain".
Jagdeo said he has in mind an agriculture blueprint that allows subsistence farming to co-exist with large-scale agriculture to create a viable enterprise.
"We cannot do it otherwise. To try to do it otherwise would ensure that we would not be able to compete globally and the only way that we can do so, that is, to compete globally, is if we drive our cost down and increase productivity and large agriculture co-existing with small scale agriculture in a synergistic relationship can deliver that for us," the president said.
Meanwhile, Minister of Agriculture Robert Persaud, who also spoke at the ceremony at the Guyana National Stadium at Providence on the east bank Demerara, South of the capital, said his ministry is actively implementing Jagdeo’s and the coalition Government’s vision to ensure food security and to make Guyana a leading food producer and exporter.
"We are working assiduously in ensuring that the Grow More Food campaign reaches every single Guyanese," Persaud said.
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