Five years and counting…
More than five years after alarm bells were first sounded over the size of the region’s annual food import bill, the yearly cost of bringing in food to the Caribbean – mostly from North America – remains anchored at US$4 billion.
There is no persuasive evidence of any sustained urging from governments in regional capitals that urgent collective measures be taken to reduce the expenditure on foods imported into the region.
In October, following years of pronouncements, plans and stillborn initiatives by her predecessors in the region, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley used the opening of the Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) to issue another reminder to Caribbean governments, not least her own, that despite the preponderance of Caricom-wide consultations and pledges, figures published by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) pointed to the abject failure of the region to put a dent in its staggering food import bill.
While Mottley is challenging the region to slash food imports by at least 25% over the next five years, there has been no substantive evidence since the passing of this year’s CWA, of any enhanced collective sense of urgency to move in that direction. “It is the same everywhere in the region. We have become past masters at talk shops that lead nowhere,” a local sector official told the Stabroek Business last week.
Mottley’s stated concern with accelerated regional food production both as a food security mechanism and a form of defence against what has been a proliferation of lifestyle diseases in the region resulting mainly from poor food consumption choices, continues to be trumped across the Caribbean by what has been a seemingly insatiable appetite for imported foods to cater as much to the ‘foreign taste’ associated with the exalted lifestyles of the well-off in the region, as to the tastes of tourists mostly from North America. In Barbados, the annual food import bill is estimated at around US$500 million.
The Barbadian Prime Minister’s address focussed as much on the condition of vulnerability in which the region finds itself in circumstances of the continued heavy dependence of its mostly fragile economies on food imports, as it did on the continued regional talk shops on regional food security that have led nowhere. Mottley was blunt in her assertion that the region lacked any clear plan to maintain food security should the existing supply chain from North America be broken.
No plan for maximising regional food security and consolidating food production has received more regional attention and endorsement for that matter, than the so-called Jagdeo Initiative (named after former Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo) of more than a decade ago. The essence of the Jagdeo Initiative reposed in an envisaged pooling of the collective resources of the Caribbean to deliver a collective response to an acknowledged overdependence of extra regional food imports and to strengthen food security region-wide.
Simply put, the Jagdeo Initiative never appeared to secure the robust political follow-up to match the rhetoric that it had generated.
It was the same with the subsequent bilateral understanding seemingly reached between Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago under which investors from the twin-island Republic would join forces with local farmers, and taking advantage of the abundance of arable agricultural lands available here, establish ‘mega farms’ to help meet regional food consumption needs. That collapsed, seemingly when the bilateral impetus weakened after the idea failed to gain traction among farmers in Trinidad and Tobago who took the position that the potential investors eyeing opportunities in Guyana should instead invest in agriculture at home.
In October, during her address to the CWA forum, the Barbados Prime Minister appeared to set the region yet another agriculture-related target; reducing the region’s food import bill by at least 25 percent over the next five years. Work towards the realisation of that target will necessitate the creation of a region-wide strategy though, as far as anyone can tell, the idea is yet to secure any real traction with regional governments. What is also unlikely to contribute to the lowering of the cost of the region’s food imports is its continued heavy dependence on the tourism sector and its attendant requirement to provide foods to cater to the tourists’ tastes.
In her address, while saluting development partners for “walking the road” with Caribbean economies over the years, Mottley said the region’s relationship with agriculture could no longer be based on a “plantation model.”
“It has to change by first and foremost being able to attract technological solutions and innovation. In a land-scarce country such as Barbados, our future in agriculture must be based on a vertical yield,” she said.
Mottley also pointed out that the time had come for the region’s best and brightest to pursue agriculture. She was critical of the “independence generation” for failing to replicate what was considered one of the most successful periods for sugar production in the region several years ago.
Insisting that the time for talk was over as it relates to agriculture in the region, Mottley said that given advances in technology and the level of liquidity in the banking system, it should be easier for the Caribbean to produce more to feed itself.
“In (Barbados) our liquidity, our savings is at about US$4.5 billion, but the instruments available and the opportunity for investment regionally for agriculture are limited. Against that background therefore, I welcome the renewed emphasis for cross-border investment,” she added.
