The Caribbean Community and the global food frenzy

Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries really ought not to have found themselves  caught up in the current global food frenzy that has spawned gloomy  predictions of widespread starvation  unless the international community takes action now to increase food production significantly over the next decade or so.

Views that link the current global food alert to the diversification of key food crops to ethanol production and the more-mouths-to-feed argument that apply chiefly to the populous nations of China and India, can hardly be applied to CARICOM whose economies have their original foundation in agriculture and whom, over more than half a century of independence have squandered opportunities not only to ensure their own food security but, collectively, to become net exporters of food.

As it happens Guyana is the only CARICOM country that enjoys that distinction, the rest of the region  having fashioned their economies – in several cases, wholly – to cater to the tourism industry, or else, specifically in the case of Trinidad and Tobago, to embark on an oil-driven path to industrial development that has placed food security on the back burner.

Last year’s US$3bn imported food bill attests to a counterproductive regional ‘addiction’ to foreign  foods driven chiefly by the affluence of a growing Caribbean middle class and the requirements of a tourism sector that depends on foods imported from North America and Europe if it is to survive. The realization that at current food prices US$3bn could easily double over the next two years appears to have finally caused the region to wake up to the reality of profligate spending and to the need to dramatically reduce its food import bill by strengthening its own food production capacity.

The regional food challenge – the term challenge better suits the CARICOM circumstance at this time –  and what is to be done to seek to create greater food security has spawned sober reflection on the persistent entreaties to the rest of CARICOM by successive governments in Guyana, first, to grow more food and, secondly, to focus on increasing the levels of intra-regional food consumption and food exports chiefly to the markets comprising the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America.

Failure to realize these goals has exposed the limitations of the much vaunted Common Agricul-tural Policy (CAP) which- as the current circumstances so clearly illustrate –  has manifestly failed to realize the goal of regional food security.

President Bharrat Jagdeo, the regional “lead Head” on Agricul-ture who finds himself leading the CARICOM ‘charge’ for regional food security has been less than diplomatic in telling off  the rest of the region for persistently ignoring the warnings from Guyana – which warnings  long precedes his own administration – that food security had to be one of the bedrocks on which the development of the region had to be be built.

At the CARICOM food forum held in Georgetown earlier this month President Jagdeo repeated his admonition to a far more attentive regional audience that now looks to Guyana provide the impetus for a strengthened regional agricultural sector. What CARICOM now seeks is to realize the repositioning of agriculture – as Trinidad and Tobago’s Agriculture Minister Arnold Piggot put it at the Lilliendal forum – “not in the traditional narrow context in which is has been seen and valued only in terms of the farm output, but to view and value it in the broader terms of agri-business. “

The re-conceptualization  of agriculture as a regional economic activity amounts to a historic U-turn from what Piggot terms the mere “farm output” to an industry that embraces the concept “that  the sector includes agricultural production, agri-processing, food  manufacturing, special and unique culinary cuisine, food service and agri-entertainment/agri-tourism.

In sum, what CARICOM seeks to do is to embrace the so-called Jagdeo Initiative as the driving force behind a novel and major cultural shift in the manner that it perceives agriculture to take account of changing global circumstances. It is a shift which, if it is to succeed, will require – perhaps above else – a sustained regional commitment to the declared direction, which is by no means assured over the medium to long term.

What the Liliendal forum sought to do, among other things, was to evaluate some of the other requirements and challenges for the desired “repositioning” of agriculture – requirements like investor inputs and investment regimes, the role of local and regional commercial banks and insurance companies, the upgrading of regional agricultural research and teaching institutions, the creation and upgrading of physical infrastructure for mega-plantations and joint venture possibilities involving existing agricultural ventures and local and overseas investors.

Guyana will, of course, be contemplating those opportunities that are likely to emerge from the regional repositioning of agricultural sector for its own economy. These include large land-lease arrangements for externally food production ventures, the creation of a viable agro-processing industry, the introduction of new technology and upgraded teaching and research institutions and the expansion of existing agricultural holdings through joint venture partnerships with external investors. What the Jagdeo administration will also be aware of is the increased influence that Guyana can ezert within CARICOM if it can emerge from the current food focus as a critical player in the quest for regional food security.