It would have come as quite a shock to many of us in the Caribbean when, around the middle of 2022, the World Bank declared that in its view the Caribbean was facing a “food crisis.”
And why not? After all, the region had always thought of itself as having sufficient food to go around. Guyana had, over time, come to be regarded as the ‘food basket’ of the Caribbean and even if, at the level of the individual territories, there might have been the need to import, some of what we consumed, a lack of access was not considered to be an issue, at least not one that was sufficiently serious to cause the less food-secure countries in the region to be ‘covered’ by the better off ones, notably Guyana.
What would have been the subject of intra-regional discussion at one forum or another, were matters like an interpretation of food security that tended to address the issue from a quantitative perspective, taking no account of the nutritional dimension to food security. There would also have been the issue of whether or not, as a region, our food security was not being compromised by the heavy dependence of some countries in the region on extra-regional food imports to meet the needs of their tourism sectors.
Those considerations apart, we in the Caribbean had always seen food insecurity as having a (more or less) geographic connotation so that we had come to associate food sufficiency challenges mostly with particular swathes of Africa and Asia, those perceptions having become etched in our consciousness by images of huge numbers of seemingly undernourished people, mostly children, and aid relief convoys moving consignments of food that always seemed insufficient to adequately address the scale of the problem.
2022 was a significant year for the Caribbean insofar as it appeared to be the first time in our history that we had decided to move beyond mostly making political pronouncements on the matter of food security. At least that is how it appeared. Previously, where making concrete progress in shoring up our food security bona fides was concerned we had failed on several counts. First our interpretation of food security had always seemed to ignore the nutritional (as against the ‘bellyful) dimension to the issue. That apart, vocal commitments on the part of CARICOM to visit and seriously address the issue of regional food security have, with hindsight, largely been a failure. Thirdly, discourses on regional food security at the level of Heads of Government can hardly be said to have gotten us anywhere as far as taking regional food security concerns forward.
We had arrived at a point more than a decade ago when we appeared to have reached a ‘regional understanding’ that Guyana, which had long been christened the bread basket of the Caribbean, would lead the charge towards regional food security. However, the notion that this ambition could be realized appeared never to take account of the fact that Guyana had always been far too preoccupied with its own considerable political and economic challenges to assume responsibility for taking on such a weighty task. Over time, the issue of strengthening the food security bona fides of the region simply slipped into the realm of polemics which is where it remained for many years.
Here, in the Caribbean, a few things have changed that have caused us have to seriously revisit the issue of regional food security. One of those was the growing awareness that the economies of most countries in the Caribbean were far too fragile to allow for the volumes of food imports that were required to meet ‘foreign tastes’ and to support the requirements of the tourism industry. By this time it had been discovered, not only that the regional dream of food security that had been created much earlier had failed to make an impact, but also that our conceptual understanding of just how food secure we were in the first place was decidedly lopsided. Not to be excluded from this equation, of course, was the fact that regional (bellyful) perceptions of food security had been decidedly misconceived in the first place and that we would have to revisit those perceptions to take on board the nutritional dimension to food security which appeared to have been ignored altogether.
2022, it would seem, was the year when the Caribbean appeared to come to grips with the reality of its food security shortcomings, evidence of this manifesting itself in various high-profile events (spearheaded by President Irfaan Ali and Prime Minister Mia Mottley) to create an agenda that would serve to bring the attention of the region more forcefully to where we stood insofar as food security was concerned. By this time, of course, another issue that has a critical bearing on food security, climate change, had become part of the equation.
The question that arises at this juncture is where we are now insofar as our journey towards regional food security is concerned. Some important collective decisions would appear to have been made, not least those relating to reducing the volume of our extra regional imports by 25% by 2025 and creating what has been described as a Regional Food Security Terminal which, presumably, will serve as a ‘stop gap’ measure in times of food-related emergency anywhere in the region. In sum, what the focus on regional food security in 2022 has done (or at least this is how it seems) is to create an agenda that seeks to strengthen the Caribbean’s food security bona fides, even though the key issue here has to do with whether or not we are, finally, going to witness a definitive regional departure from our proclivity for getting ourselves to the starting line and remaining there.
