25 X 2025 is the most recent ‘formula’ devised in the Caribbean to set a time frame for helping to clear one of the region’s key hurdles, the realization of food security. 25 x 2025 commits the region to reducing the current volume of its food imports by 25% by 2025. It is a challenging undertaking when account is taken of the ingrained foreign taste of people across much of the region. Cutting back on food imports will also challenge countries in the region that must satisfy the ‘imported’ tastes of the thousands of tourists who keep their economies afloat. Setting all of these considerations aside the region’s track record over the years for realizing other food security-related targets has been nothing short of abysmal.
The content of President Irfaan Ali’s address, delivered at the recently concluded Conference of Heads of CARICOM governments in Paramaribo suggests that he is a convert to both the 25 x 2025 target as well as the region’s broader food security ambitions. That, of course, is an inherited responsibility. In Paramaribo he did little to conceal his effort to rally the rest of CARICOM around both the 25 x 2025 timeline as well as the envisaged broader food security ambitions of the region. The Suriname address, one might even argue, marks the first definitive indicator of what the Guyanese President appears to see as his inherited responsibility to assume the position of food security ‘Czar’ of the region.
If this is indeed the case then President Ali must begin by accepting that none of his predecessors in the job, all of whom preceded him as President of Guyana, performed anywhere near creditably as ‘lead’ CARICOM Head of Government in matters relating to regional food security. It is from that position that he has to begin.
It would doubtless be a considerable achievement for CARICOM if the 25 X 2025 timeline is realized. That would set a historic precedent on the road to the wider ambition of regional food security. This, in the context of the broader seemingly worsening global security concerns, would be nothing short of a historic accomplishment for the region.
President Ali and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley would appear to be among the more animated backers of the region’s food security push never mind the fact that Barbados, given the island’s heavy dependence on tourism, could well be challenged to help meet the strictures of 25 x 2025 depending on what those are and whether Barbados, and other tourism-dependent countries in the region, can make such adjustments as may be necessary to allow them to live within the confines of those strictures.
If indeed 25 x 2025 can be accomplished, and that, all things considered, is by no means a certainty, that accomplishment would go a considerable way towards helping the region to correct its various food security-related failures over the years.
One interesting question that arises here is whether or not 25 x 2025 may not well turn out to be President Ali’s finest moment as a Caribbean leader. It would appear that the opportunity is certainly there given the fact Guyana’s tenure as the region’s food security Czar has, up until now, been light years away from being successful under his predecessors in the presidency. Not that all of the blame can be heaped at our door. There has been, over the years, far too much dithering and dilatoriness on the issue of regional food security. In fact, there exists more than ample reason to suggest that some member countries of the Community may even be altogether indifferent to the whole idea of any overwhelming dependence on home-cultivated/home-manufactured foods.
Even with the rigorous application of the collective energies of the countries of the region 25 x 2025 is, for some particular reason, unlikely to be a proverbial walk in the park. Coming even close to realizing this objective would not only require key inputs from Guyana but will demand a level of collective endeavour from a group of countries that sometimes appear to thrive on self- interest-related spats in matters where national interest and the regional good appear to collide. Even on what one might think is a common ambition of the region to arrive at a juncture of regional food security the respective member countries of the movement have, more often than not, failed to ‘hold one head’ as we say in Guyana.
There can be no doubt that coming even close to meeting the regional 25 x 2025 timeline will require a significant level of active leadership from Guyana. One might even add with a considerable degree of certainty that in the absence of Guyana’s inputs, 25 x 2025 will become much more of a mountain to climb since there can be little doubt that if CARICOM is to reduce its extra-regional food imports by a quarter by 2025 it would be Guyana, to a considerable extent, that would have to ‘step up’ to fill that gap.
This time around, hopefully, the additional ‘clout’ that Guyana possesses as an oil-producing country may add an enhanced measure of traction to President Ali’s position as ‘lead’ Head-of-Government in the Caribbean on food security, never mind the fact that we can never rule out CARICOM’s proclivity for losing its way. If and when that happens it will then be up to President Ali to put his negotiating skills to work to contribute to the settling of such differences in order to salvage the wider objective. President Ali’s other key mission in this regard would be to ‘engineer’ the re-make of the relevant domestic infrastructure, notably in the agriculture sector, in order to better equip it to provide an adequate response to its broader regional responsibility.
By placing himself at the forefront of the region’s 25 x 2025 initiative President Ali would appear to have demonstrated a preparedness to serve as its Bell Crier and while it is early days yet the move could enhance his stature as a leader in the region. Indeed, it could hardly have been by accident that his address to the CARICOM Summit in Paramaribo turned out to be, in large measure, a ‘hard sell’ for 25 x 2025 and by extension for regional food security.
Up until now CARICOM has found the ambition of accomplishing the goal of regional food security to be a decidedly elusive one. This, regional analysts believe has been, in large measure, a function of the Community’s enduring propensity for confusing high-sounding rhetoric with practical action. Over the years the region’s food security terrain had become strewn with exaggerated ambitions which have vanished as quickly as they have materialized once their implementation were fully thought through. Indeed, without even bothering to give those ambitions what we in Guyana describe as a ‘decent sendoff’ the various member counties quickly re-directed their attention to their myriad domestic preoccupations.
Force of circumstances, however, continually drive us back to ‘first base.’ This time around we are confronted by the reality of a much more severe global food crisis to which can now be added issues like aggravated climate change challenges that place stricter limits on agriculture in some Caribbean countries, the protracted underdevelopment of the region’s agro-processing sector, nutrition-related challenges in the region linked to diet-related considerations and more recently, region-wide setbacks in agriculture linked to the global Covid-19 crisis.
In Paramaribo, President Ali appeared prepared to go out on a proverbial limb, ‘swinging’ for 25 x 2025 and seeking to urge his colleagues to embrace his enthusiasm. In so doing one feels that President Ali was seeking not just to rally the rest of the region behind the 25 x 2025 goal but also to incrementally enhance his own credentials as the region’s ‘point man’ on food security. He can hardly be faulted there.
