Warnings last week from the Barbados-based Caribbean Institute for Meteorology & Hydrology (CIMH) of “heavy rains and possible flooding…for December” in the region could not have come at a more inopportune time.
While it is true that the vicissitudes of climate change instruct that, going forward, the Caribbean is likely to encounter increasingly more hostile weather patterns, the pre-existing challenges that link the weather with the social and economic fortunes of the region makes the CMC’s warning much more serious than it otherwise would have been. The warnings that the Caribbean may well have to confront incrementally more hostile climate change-related weather patterns ahead have come on the heels of earlier reports that some CARICOM member countries, particularly Trinidad and Tobago, have already begun to face levels of flooding that have forced farmers to walk away from their farms until the weather changes.
In some of the smaller territories in the region, there have also been reports of heavy rains laying waste to their own far more modest agricultural pursuits. Ominously, Guyana too has begun to witness what appears to be the start of those familiar seasonal torrential downpours that are known to ravage the country’s agricultural sector, notably its rice crop, creating more limited farm produce scarcity than elsewhere in the region but placing limits on exports of rice, particularly, to other less food sufficient territories in the region.
These glitches have been known to have implications for market retention. In the light of the anticipated heavy rainfall in the period ahead the issue arises as to whether this will not negatively impact the undertaking given by CARICOM member countries earlier this year to shore up its food security bona fides by setting itself a target of reducing its extra regional food imports by 25% by 2025 and whether the impact of the predicted weather pattern, going forward, may not be sufficiently severe to impair progress in pursuit of the setting up of the planned regional food terminal in Barbados.
While the setting up of the terminal is being coordinated by the sister CARICOM member country, the effective implementation of the project will depend heavily on inputs from Guyana, the acknowledged ‘food basket’ of the region. The CIMH has been unequivocal in its warning of what it says is “a bigger risk (of rain in December) than in other years,” whilst pointedly declining to pronounce on whether or not the rains are likely to persist beyond the end of December. Much more than in previous years, parts of the Caribbean have been compelled to focus on the issue of food security, not only on account of threats to the global food distribution system resulting from the Russia-Ukraine hostilities’ impact on worldwide shipping, but because of weaknesses in the region’s recent food production regime.
Back in April this year a joint survey conducted by CARICOM and the World Food Programme (WFP) revealed that an estimated 2.8 million people, nearly 40 percent of the population in the English-speaking Caribbean, had arrived at the point of being “food insecure”, one million more than had been the case two years earlier. The findings, the report said, proffered evidence of deteriorating food consumption and diets with 25 per cent of respondents eating less preferred foods, 30 per cent skipping meals or eating less than usual and five per cent going an entire day without eating in the week leading up to the survey.
