Given what we were told just a matter of months ago was the perilous state in which some countries in the region found themselves, this newspaper has made the point regarding the need for there to be a periodic region-wide up-date on the pace of progress towards the operationalization of the Regional Food Terminal.
We have done so for a few reasons. First, because since the earlier disclosure about the region’s food security circumstances, no information has been made available to suggest that the situation has improved and, moreover, we are gauging the wider global situation and taking the circumstances to mean that the situation in the Caribbean is unlikely to have improved to the point where our food security concerns can be set to one side.
Again, too, we make the point that we are in no way leaving aside the efforts of Barbados and Guyana to get the Terminal ‘up and running.’ As it happens, however, if we are to be guided by precedent, previous regional ‘food security’ undertakings with Heads of Government at their helm have crashed and burnt previously and perhaps more poignantly there is nothing to suggest that we have learnt from our errors. In matters such as regional food security and a few others the region has a reputation for initiatives that tend, all too frequently, not to go much beyond `gyaff’.
Except this editorial is profoundly mistaken what is being asked for here ought to be no more difficult than a proverbial ‘cake walk.’ Two CARICOM member countries and their Heads of Government have been assigned the responsibility for seeing the Food Security Terminal through. The two have already assigned their imprimatur and presumably their relevant functionaries to the assignment. If the assignment is an ongoing one – and it is our impression that this is what it is – then suitable ‘time frames’ should surely be not all that difficult to set for reporting to the region as a whole on the forward movement of the project. No such sustained updates (rather than ‘terse’ and less than explicit missives that are limited in their circulation) have been available. This, in circumstances where such an assignment should be hived off, primarily, to the ‘specialist public servants in Guyana and Barbados, particularly, whom we assume, now have an intimate relationship with the project.
What is shocking here is that given the weight of the importance that has been attached to the widely trumpeted 25×2025 food imports target, no periodic updates nor timeline for completion would appear to have been attached to the project. More than that, there is nothing in the manner in which the Food Terminal project has been treated (in terms of keeping the people of the region ‘posted’) that acknowledges the considerable likelihood that knowing where they stand (some more than others) in terms of ‘food security, going forward, is a priority at this time.
Truth be told, there is no reason on earth why this cannot be done and why (as we have publicly inquir-ed previously) there ought not to be a role here for the Georgetown-based CARICOM Secretariat which surely possesses the capacity to execute such a mundane undertaking. Indeed, one feels that there is hardly even a need here for the ritual of a ‘signing off’ by regional Heads of simply ensuring that the people of the region are afforded not just timely periodic updates on the pace of progress towards the readiness of the Terminal and beyond that a transparent briefing on just how the Food Terminal will function.
