A recent assessment by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the global food security situation – some aspects of which are reported in this issue of the Stabroek Business – strongly suggests that at least up until now and in the wake of the advent of COVID-19, global supplies are holding their own even though, worryingly, longer-term availability threats still revolve around high prices as well as challenges associated with getting supplies to those regions where life-threatening shortages exist.
Getting food to hungry people must of course be an ongoing priority at this time and both the relevant international organisations and suitably equipped countries have a responsibility to pursue that objective. After all, it would be an unacceptable travesty if, even as the global indicators suggest that food supplies appear to be holding up, there occurs famines in parts of the world that have to do with an inability to get food to those places.
One of the lessons that is emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic is the global importance of a strong agricultural base and the worthwhileness of investment in countries’ agricultural sectors. Contextually, one might add that it is simply not worth the while to repetitively make the point about the complete ‘hash’ that the Caribbean has made of opportunities to take serious and lasting food security initiatives. The list of failures, over successive governments in the region, over time, is distressingly lengthy, as lengthy as the various feasibility studies and strategic plans that have been trotted out and which then vanished into the thick mist of rhetoric altogether bereft of follow-up action.
Here, Guyana, no less than the other countries in the region, is culpable. We are after all, best-positioned within CARICOM to lead the regional food security charge, though, frankly, our practical and sustained pursuit of this objective has been weighed and found wanting. Contextually, there are those who may argue that we still do our bit by exporting some of our high-quality and cheap farm produce to other countries in the region. That, however, is no substitute for playing a far more dynamic leadership role in the creation of a sturdy regional security framework, which is precisely what we have failed to do.
Whether the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and what we are told could be the eventual longer-term threat to food security ought to now trigger serious discourse on regional security is not an issue that should be allowed to simply come and go. The problem is, however, that given their abysmal track record on the issue, one has to begin by wondering whether yet another opportunity will yield a different result.
Perhaps, this time around, a politically driven effort may be sobered by the fact that our annual regional food import bill now ‘tops’ US$5 billion, this, for a region that simply cannot afford to pay. Even this circumstance, however, provides no iron clad assurance that the indifference of our political leaders will change. Maybe they have grown too accustomed to ‘mucking around’ with the creation of blueprints for regional food security which, in the fullness of time, are either shelved or shredded.
It has been suggested in some quarters that the indifference of some Caribbean territories to strengthening the region’s agricultural base has to do, in large measure, with the fact that tourism, the biggest money-earner for some territories, demands that they focus on visitor tastes by ensuring adequate supplies of those imported foods to which their visitors are accustomed. If this is indeed the case it bespeaks an abject failure on the part of the regional tourism sector, and particularly the food and beverages sub-sector, to create a tourism-friendly cuisine that has its roots largely in our indigenous agricultural produce. If indeed that is the case it is not just an unpardonable failure but one of the factors that has left the economies of the tourism-driven territories weighed down by astronomical food import bills with which our predominantly fragile economies are confronted and which we manifestly cannot afford.
In a sense, the blame for this shortcoming has to be laid at the feet of the Caribbean Community… not the assorted technocrats and bureaucrats who simply do the bidding of the politicians, but the politicians themselves, whose ‘plans,’ all too frequently, are shaped in a manner that seeks to extract maximum traction with political constituencies, which approach, all too often, erects walls that lock in fanciful ideas and shut out eminently sound ones.
There is, at this juncture, the enormous likelihood that we may ‘miss the bus’ altogether in terms of regional food security if we are not careful. Other seemingly more worthwhile distractions, like the recent significant oil finds in Guyana and Suriname might well, as we begin to see the material gains that those options deliver, cause us to think that the building of a strong regional agricultural base is not the way to go, after all. Oil or no oil, that would be, particularly in the case of Guyana, an act of unpardonable betrayal of both our farmers and our agricultural sector as a whole. These have been the ‘stayers’ in the country’s economy and there can be no question that some of the returns from the seemingly more lucrative sectors (like oil and gold) should be assigned to major investments in the agriculture sector.
Whether (political) wisdom will prevail here and whether, in the instance of Guyana, for example, the pursuit of a ‘green economy’ will be allowed to persist and to be strengthened through strategic investments deriving from the returns from the fossil fuel sector is another matter. Caribbean politicians have, over time, proven themselves, frequently, to be unfathomable and their historic proclivity for missed opportunities have left us, all too frequently, pondering that ‘what if?’ question.
