(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) Antigua and Barbuda’s Minister of Agriculture, Lands, Housing and the Environment, Hon. Hilton Baptiste, on Tuesday made an impassioned plea for key decision-makers in the agriculture sector to take serious steps to give farmers the protection they need to guarantee food and nutrition security in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

Delivering the feature address at the opening ceremony of Caribbean Regional Symposium on Disaster Risk Management on 15 June, at the Jolly Beach Resort, Minister Baptiste, said that with the food import bill of the Region exceeding $4B, the time had come for action to insure the agriculture sector and create the environment for greater investments.

The three-day symposium has been coordinated by the CARICOM Secretariat, the Ministry of Agriculture of Antigua and Barbuda and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA). The World Bank, the Caribbean Development Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) and Government of Australia Aid Programme have supported the event.

The Symposium is seeking to devise measures towards the creation of a sufficiently coordinated framework at the national and regional levels, critical to greater investment in agriculture production and marketing. Policymakers, technical advisers, development partners, representatives of private insurance companies and financial institutions, as well as representatives of farmers’ organisations are all gathered in Antigua to chart the way forward.

In a very candid presentation, Minister Baptiste said “all talk and no action is a waste of time.” He said that he was keen on removing the deficient and uncoordinated risk management measures including praedial larceny as a key binding constraint to agriculture development, by the end of 2010. Among the measures he proposed to take the process forward was the review of archaic legislations inhibiting advancements in the sector in the 21st century. In particular, he suggested, farmers must have the right of ownership of lands on which to live as a means of minimising praedial larceny and to facilitate the transfer of knowledge of agricultural practices to future generations.

The Antigua Agriculture Minister called for increased levels of research, the sharing of knowledge and technologies, as well as the harmonisation of policies on agricultural development in the Region.

“Let us be focused in ensuring that the agriculture sector stands out in the Region,” he said, adding that there was no need to “reinvent the wheel” but to learn from existing practices and studies already done.

“It is more important now that we take serious steps to give farmers the protection that they need,” he said adding that the sector was too often viewed as a “non entity” with minimal budgetary allocations when compared with other sectors such as tourism.

“We have got to demonstrate that this is the number one industry, and be proud to work in it and for it,” Minister Baptiste said.

Stressing the need for collaboration among key stakeholder towards the creation of a framework for disaster risk management he said: “One disaster could wipe out the entire agricultural sector in the region; we have seen it happening in the past and it could again.”

With the prediction of an active 2010 hurricane season in the Caribbean Region, he said action was urgent.

“We don’t have long to wait, we need to work hard today and come up with a plan to make sure that something happens sooner rather than later; we must be able to tell the insurance companies want we want, and negotiate on behalf of the farmers of the Region to make sure that they all get the protection they need,” Mr. Baptiste said.

The first formal session of the Caribbean Regional Symposium on Disaster Risk Management begins on Wednesday 16 June. The Symposium ends on Friday 18 June. Among its expected outcomes are development of technical capacity among key stakeholders in the management of disasters, and the establishment of agricultural insurance schemes in the Region.

CONTACT: piu@caricom.org