In the face of sluggish oil prices and a consequential reduction in the availability of foreign exchange, oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago is once again being warned of its high-dependency on imported foods and the longer-term consequences for consumer affordability.
A week ago yesterday President of the country’s Supermarkets Association Dr Yunus Ibrahim disclosed that Guyana’s sister Caricom country has had to face a sharp spike in food prices. And in the wake of this pronouncement, T&T economist Dr Roger Hosein said that the response of the country must be a rapid increase in food production if prices are to fall.
“Scarcity in the availability of foreign exchange would restrict the amount of food imports and any decrease in supply with demand remaining fairly constant would see prices move upwards,” quipped Hosein in a comment to the Trinidad Express on Thursday March 17. Down the road, Hosein said, Trinidad needs to increase domestic food production, “so that local prices would be lowered in the context of enhanced supplies coming onto the market of those products that we can produce locally.”
A report monitored by this newspaper quotes the Trinidadian economist as saying that the key to pushing food prices down is to diversify the country’s economy, particularly its agricultural sector in order to increase inflows on foreign exchange so as to reduce the country’s dependency “on one or two main sectors.”
None of this is of course new to Trinidad and Tobago, the Caricom country which has been tagged as the chief delinquent in terms of high dependency on foreign food imports, a luxury which its energy-driven economy allowed it to afford.
Four years ago, during Caribbean Week of Agriculture the region as a whole was jolted by the reality that its food import bill had reached US$4 billion and that there was a need to tackle the problem as a facet of a broader regional food security initiative. Following the wake-up call some countries in the region, including Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, declared their intention to work bilaterally and through the machinery of the Caribbean Community to strengthen the food position of their respective territories and Caricom as a whole.
Specifically, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago signed an agreement under which Trinidad was to acquire large tracts of land in various parts of the country to undertake plantation-scale agriculture. There had been protestations from farmers in Port of Spain on the grounds that there was sufficient available land in Trinidad and Tobago and there was no need for the country’s investors to resort to land acquisition here.
