Confronted with an annual food import bill in the region of US$5 billion and seemingly possessed of a viable collective regional policy for significantly reducing that bill, Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries have reportedly signalled their robust support for an intra-regional consultation ahead of September’s United Nations Food Summit in New York where food security is expected to be high on the agenda.
A collective perspective on how to reduce the region’s annual food import bill is reportedly on the front burner of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture’s (IICA) Special Advisory Committee on Management Issues (SACMI) consultations ahead of the UN Food Summit in an effort to ensure that the concerns of the region make a significant impact there.
Though not a member of SACMI, Guyana, given the pre-eminent role it plays in regional agriculture, is reportedly working with the six permanent member countries of SACMI – Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, United States and Venezuela – in a bid to ensure that the Americas, its governments, institutions and farmers are properly represented at the global forum.
The substantive purpose of SACMI is to strengthen the organisational muscle of IICA.
September’s UN food forum is expected to address, among other things, the state of agriculture in the Caribbean and the Americas while one of its priority challenges will be reaching agreement on new initiatives designed to further the achievement of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) all of which have linkages to healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable food systems.
With the UN summit now five months away, IICA Director General Manuel Otero has reminded the SACMI delegates that the Institute is defending the agriculture sector as an “essential and key link in the global agri- food system.” IICA is to provide regional governments with “a conceptual document about the future of agri-food systems from the perspective of agriculture in the Americas. The document will reflect discussions with Member States, civil society, and the private sector…We trust that it will serve as the basis for reflection and action, so that the countries of the Americas may arrive at a joint position in preparation for this major Summit,” Otero is quoted as saying.
At the beginning of April the CARICOM Secretariat in Georgetown disclosed that the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) had provided CARDI with a US$600,000 grant for what it described as a “research and capacity-building initiative grant” to fund research aimed at improving the production, processing, and marketing of sweet potato in the region.
The level of food importation into the Caribbean is not simply a reflection of the failure of the region to pay sufficient attention to the growth of its agriculture and agro-processing sectors, but also a function of the linkage between the region’s economic dependence on visitor arrivals from North America and the need to meet their culinary preferences.
Advocates of the placing of a higher priority on reducing food imports have argued that one initiative that may not have been fully explored is a more vigorous culinary effort to entice visitors to the region into embracing more wholeheartedly, foods and menus originating in the region through more creative food preparation and presentation.
Part of the focus of the CDB-funded sweet potato initiative is to seek to identify and entrench best practices in sweet potato cultivation, processing and value-added product development. An additional component of the project is the provision of training for farmers and agro-processors in the use of new technologies.
