It is entirely unsurprising that a good deal of official media-driven hype and hoopla surrounds the three-day May 19-21 Agri Investment Forum and Expo, the current ‘selling point’ being that a number of Caribbean Community Heads will be travelling to Georgetown for the event.
Not that government can be blamed for continuing to blow a huge trumpet, loud enough for the blast to reach across the international community in order to draw attention to what, these days, is the exalted position in which it finds itself at the level of the international community. On the question of anything that has to do with agriculture and more particularly with regional food security, it has to be prepared to have the country thumb its nose. After all, haven’t we gone down that trumpet blowing road before and haven’t we, on every occasion, failed to deliver?
So that the expected assembling of the Heads of Government who will be meeting here in a few weeks’ time, will be staged against the backdrop of the repeated failure at the levels of both the regional heads and their assorted experts in the various food production-related disciplines, to arrive at a formula for reducing the regional food security deficit. Worse than that, under their watch our food import bill has grown like a huge, seemingly immovable burden on the back of the region.
It is, as well, hardly by accident that the Heads of Government are assembling here, Guyana has long been tagged the ‘lead’ Caribbean country insofar as the Caribbean agricultural sector is concerned. Over time, much of the regional contemplation associated with strengthening our food security status has revolved around the strength of the country’s agricultural sector, never mind the fact that under Guyana’s leadership ‘watch,’ as the ‘lead player,’ the Caribbean has failed to improve its overall food security position. That failure is manifested in the reality of the multi-billion US$ annual food import bill with which the region is saddled and the absence, up until now of any clear idea as to how that bill can be significantly reduced any time soon.
Here, it is apposite to wonder whether the fact that a number of CARICOM Heads are actually making the trip to Georgetown for the forum is an indication of a belated, greater determination to seek to develop some kind of implementable formula for the collective enhancement of the region’s position insofar as taking near-term concrete action to significantly boost agricultural production in the region is concerned. One raises this question acutely aware of the familiar pattern of ‘noises’ that emanate from these high level meetings which, all too frequently end up with dead-end communiques that set regional experts to work producing plans on paper that never arrive at that critical stage of effective implementation.
While the evidence would appear to suggest that some CARICOM countries, including Barbados and Jamaica, have been seeking to shore up their agricultural sectors and might even have succeeded in making inroads into sections of the international market, the overall evidence suggests that as a region, we still remain some distance away from being food secure, that condition, one might add, and despite what, frequently, has been official protestations to the contrary, applying even to Guyana, where some hinterland communities are, from all accounts, still adrift of the criteria for being described as food secure.
The media, of course, have wasted no time in focusing on the fact that Guyana will shortly be entertaining multiple Caribbean Heads of Government, simultaneously, a condition to which we are not accustomed. What we need to be mindful however, is that the deliberations at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre not fall into the familiar and frustrating pattern of rhetoric, hype and hoopla that proffer undertakings to do much but ultimately fail to move the food security process forwards.
As was mentioned earlier the telltale signs of us going down that road usually reposes in hiving off rhetorical commitments made by Heads of Government to bureaucrats to be converted into tomes of documents that are not particularly known for getting past the national archives in the respective CARICOM territories. If, therefore, the deliberations that will ensue at the Arthur Chung Conference in a few days are not hinged to some kind of concrete road map to getting the regional food security show firmly ‘on the road,’ then it would have been pointless for the Regional Heads to bother to put in an appearance in the first place. Enough that we do as a region is already decorated by meaningless theatre.
