(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) The Caribbean needs to have more investment in agriculture if the sector is to match the increasing demand to produce more food in order to ensure food security for the Caribbean.

According to Jose Fonseca, a senior policy maker with the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Development (CTA), while the Caribbean continues to stress the importance of food security, the region faces challenges to get investment in the agriculture sector. To this end he said while the CTA, which is currently holding its annual seminar in Belgium, was not a donor agency, it was collaborating with organisations in the Caribbean to provide support for the agriculture sector in specific areas.

He revealed that the CTA was working with the Caribbean in the areas of innovation and communication. In the former, the agency was providing technical assistance to guide producers on how to add value to primary agriculture production in food and meat. In the latter the assistance related to the development of strategies for communicating with the public on agriculture issues as well as devising mechanisms for engaging journalists to make them interested in covering the agriculture sector.

The CTA’s work in the Caribbean is in collaboration with the Caribbean Agricultural  Research and Development Institute (CARDI), the Caribbean Farmers Association (CaFAN) and the Inter American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA). The CARICOM Secretariat, through CARDI is also involved in this collaboration.

Mr. Fonseca said this collaboration in the Caribbean was of utmost importance as the issues facing the agriculture sector needed to be widely understood as Caribbean governments sought to implement policies and programmes to ensure food security for their people.

“The CTA is not a donor agency but the technical assistance and limited financial support that we provide to countries such as those in the Caribbean are very important to the wider agriculture agenda,” he said.

The bulk of CTA’s work in the Caribbean is being done with CARDI, whose Executive Director, Dr. Arlington Chesney said the CARDI-CTA relationship was now moving in a new direction. He informed that the cornerstone of this new direction was the CARDI-CTA Technical Cooperation arrangement, which was designed to develop and use information and communication technology towards developing a sustainable regional agriculture sector.