Your Excellency, the President of Guyana, Honourable Ministers, Distinguished Delegates, Staff of the Secretariat, Members of the Media, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Mr. President, it is with pleasure that I welcome you, Ministers of Agriculture and delegations to our new Headquarters Building so beautifully provided by the Government of Guyana. We think it was a worthy end to the waiting.
This is the first Meeting of COTED convened at our new building. This is also one of those rare occasions when a Lead Head of Government is meeting specifically with Ministers with national responsibility for his area of CARICOM responsibility in order to give consideration to the measures and policies that have to be implemented. This is clearly a measure of the importance that the President and indeed the Region attach to the role of Agriculture, not only for its economic contribution to the Region’s progress, but also for its contribution to the social well-being of the Region’s peoples.
Recent events in our regional and external markets have served to highlight the need and urgency for action in the agricultural sector. Regionally, the January 1st 2006 coming into being of the Single Market, that will be celebrated in another 10 days in Jamaica, highlights the opportunities which the agriculture sector must position itself to exploit. Six of our Member States – Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago – are ready to exploit and provide opportunities and markets for the movement of goods, services and factors of production (Capital and skills). The expectation is that six other Member States – Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines – would expand that Single market by end of March 2006.
In our external markets, developments relating particularly to bananas and sugar increase the urgency for the removal of the constraints in our agriculture sectors. Indeed, recent decisions by the European Union and the deliberations at the World Trade organisation just concluded meeting in Hong Kong, remove any doubts about the urgency of action in this regard.
In the recent visits of the Rt. Hon. Owen Arthur, Lead Prime Minister for the CSME and his Technical Team to Member States, these Member States have raised issues relating to the many constraints identified in the proposals from President Jagdeo. These include response to the needs in transportation, financing, land use, natural disasters – they were all highlighted as requiring urgent and dedicated attention. It is therefore critical if our nationals are to see the benefits of our integration arrangements or to secure a viable place in the international market, that we must be able to develop an agriculture sector which from investment to production, from production to markets, from markets to table, receives the necessary support to put it on a stronger and more secure footing.
And this is so, notwithstanding the importance of other important sectors such as services in our economies, for agriculture will always remain the bread and butter or as I said at the recent COTED meeting, “the rice and beans” for many of our countries. It is critical to our regional food security and to our reducing our 3.6 billion US dollar annual food import bill.
Finally, Mr. President, even while we seek to fast track or speed up the implementation of the various interventions to remove what Member States have identified as key constraints to be addressed in your proposals for “Strengthening Agriculture for Sustainable Growth and Development,” other initiatives being taken to create the single space which is the Single Market and Economy are necessary to complement the action being taken to remove the constraints. Our trading arrangements – intra and extra regional, our investment environment and particularly, our dedication to making the CSME complete by 2008, are all necessary for a vibrant agriculture sector.
Mr. President, you have been an example of that dedication which we all aim to emulate. I thank you.