One of the predictable developments that appears to have derived from the recently concluded Thirty-Third Inter-Sessional Meeting of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) was the official ‘anointing’ of President Irfaan Ali as the ‘lead’ CARICOM Head on the issue of regional food security. This, presumably, means that he will have a role to play in everything that attends ensuring that the region moves, with the requisite haste, not just to significantly reduce its food import bill but also to increase its food output to the extent where the food security threats arising out of seasonal inclement weather are reduced to a more acceptable comfort level.
President Ali, whilst in Belize this week, underlined the removal of trade barriers as an important prerequisite for enhancing food security, a point which underlines, not for the first time, the complete folly of the dichotomy of trade barriers that exist between and amongst countries in the region (some more than others) and the oft-articulated desire for a food-secure region. Here, the extent of the double standard becomes palpably laughable.
In Belize, the President was expected to “present a paper on these areas” and to “provide an outline of the objectives by both Guyana and the Region as a whole, along with comprehensive strategies in achieving the target of reducing the Region’s food import bill by 25% by 2025.”
One expects, not only that President Ali’s ‘paper’ would have benefitted from inputs from the best technical minds in Guyana and perhaps even further afield, but also that it would set out, simply and clearly, the particular prerequisites for the realization of the goal of regional security as well as a timetable for the implementation of the various facets of an overall regional food security plan.
Here, one might add that the President can only anticipate region-wide confidence in what he has to say about regional food security if what he says is set down in a manner that details both time lines and objectives for the realization of particular goals. In other words, any plans that are crafted around polemics and designed to win political points rather than to guide us to real solutions are bound to encounter critical, even cynical responses.
There are those who will argue, with considerable justification, that if Guyana is to provide leadership to the region in its pursuit of food security it must possess, at the level of its own institutions, the technical competence to deliver that leadership. Here it has to be said that questions about the capacity of the Ministry of Agriculture to give a satisfactory level of institutional support to the President’s regional leadership in the matter of food security should be seriously examined.
Beyond that, there is the role that the machinery of the Caribbean Community will have to play, through its own intellectual resources in contributing to the realization of the overall goal. Here, it has to be said that our seeming lack of success in translating the various studies and recommendations on agriculture and food security generated by CARICOM specialists into practical action on account of the apparent dilatoriness of CARICOM governments is not a circumstance that can be easily swept aside.
One of the bigger challenges that CARICOM faces at this time appears to be its signalling that it wants to restore food security to the top of the agenda at a time when, perhaps more than ever before, the issue of food security has grown as a global emergency. Here in the Caribbean, as elsewhere in the world, food security challenges are increasingly being impacted by the vicissitudes of climate change. Worryingly, one might even envisage a point in time, not too far ahead, when climate considerations might sufficiently overwhelm some Caribbean territories to an extent that compromises their ability to feed themselves. This would mean that some kind of alternative regional arrangement will have to be created to ensure that their food supplies are assured.
As the problems associated with food security in the region become increasingly shared it could become important for the region to implement a collective response to the food security question, one that is underpinned by a significantly stepped up level of cooperation between and amongst the specialized food production-related (agriculture, agro processing, manufacturing) in the region in order to ensure a level of response to a common food security challenge that demands the mobilization of the best human and technical resources in the region. Here, one might add that countries in the region will have to be prepared to make investments – proportionate to their spending power – to invest in the pursuit of research into disciplines that include the science associated with agriculture and agro-processing, among others, and methods of maximizing food production whilst ensuring that nutritional safeguards are not compromised.
As has already been mentioned one only need look at where we are as a region on the issue of food security, up to this time, to determine that the posturing, the polemics and the propaganda have failed us. Here, the real problem is that we are not, in 2022, where we were a decade or two ago insofar as the sense of urgency associated with regional food security is concerned.
The key problems, truth be told, have been political and not sufficient has been done, either at the level of individual member states or at the level of the machinery of CARICOM to resolve those problems. If no one is about to admit it, arguably the biggest challenge confronting the region in the search for a response to its food security issues is the persistence of a condition in which national posturing (for one reason or another) continues to far outweigh any corresponding collective determination to understand the magnitude of the challenge associated with regional food security and to apply a commensurate sense of urgency to the collective implementation of corrective measures.
