For all the measures put in place by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to roll back the tide of food insecurity following the United Nations World Food Programme’s (WFP) revelation late last year that 4.1 million people (or 57 percent of the region’s population) were facing food insecurity, concerns persist that the region is still some distance from being out of the woods on the issue.
A more recent survey suggests that last year’s food insecurity condition which appeared to take the people of the region by surprise, remains unchanged. This year’s WFP/CARICOM probe reports that 52 per cent of the population of the English-speaking Caribbean, totaling some 3.7 million people, remain food insecure. It would appear, too, that the bad news has come notwithstanding last year’s commitment to the aggressive acceleration of remedial agricultural pursuits, the setting of a target of a 25% reduction in the importation of extra-regional foods and (perhaps most significantly) an ambitious regional initiative, spearheaded by Guyana and Barbados to establish and maintain a regional Food Security Terminal to serve the region in times of difficulty.
If much of the credit for getting the Terminal off the ground must go to the governments of Guyana and Barbados, the need, after several months, to cause the region to be provided with a comprehensive update on the pace of progress towards the completion of the project has become patently apparent. Mind you, no one is asking for the concocting of a progress that ‘manufactures’ facts but one which provides an honest assessment of, at least, the best case scenario, for the completion of the Terminal. This, particularly in view of the fact that since the launch of the Food Security Terminal initiative, indications are that the food security status of the region, as a whole, has become worse, not better. Back in February this year, the Georgetown-based CARICOM Secretariat had hosted a meeting between CARICOM’s Deputy Secretary General, Dr. Armstrong Alexis, and a delegation from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), the discourses reportedly centring on the Region’s food security concerns though little was publicly disclosed regarding the outcomes of those meetings.
Perhaps, more significantly, given the high profile which food security had realized on the regional agenda, one might have thought that the forum of the recently concluded CARICOM summit in Port-of-Spain might have been a fitting forum from which to ‘fill in’ the people of the region, in a significant way, on the state of readiness of the Food Terminal. Here, it would have been altogether reasonable to expect that timelines for the partial or complete readiness of the Food Terminal to begin to serve the region would have been provided. No such update has been provided. Here, it is apposite to state that while the Heads of Government of Guyana and Barbados would have much broader agendas to cover, one expects that a project of such immense regional significance would merit oversight from suitably qualified functionaries in the two countries who, as the project proceeds, are progressively positioned to provide the desired periodic updates. That, in Guyana, at least as far as it appears, is decidedly not the case.
Here, it should be stated that while there is no intention to dismiss the quality of leadership afforded the Food Terminal project by the Heads of Government of Guyana and Barbados, the region, as a whole, is doing itself a disservice by not providing regular and reliable updates on the status of a project which, we are told, is envisaged as one of the important planks in the overall infrastructure designed to strengthen the Caribbean’s food security bona fides. Given the two recent high-profile reports which suggest that the region’s food security bona fides remain in a worrisome condition the question arises as to whether both the region’s commitment to a Food Security Terminal as well as the promised reduction in extra-regional food imports (25×2025) ought not to be attended by agreed-to timelines for updates on these undertakings, until the actual missions have been accomplished.
During the aforementioned meeting between regional officials and functionaries from the World Food Programme various “critical priorities” emerged from the engagements. These included an understanding on the initiation of country-led needs assessments, humanitarian responses, and expanded social safety nets, the boosting of sustainable agricultural production for upcoming harvests, the provision of regular agricultural market information and the development of a dashboard/interactive to consolidate and present data, track financial resources and share research. Have these mechanisms been put in place? Whatever the mechanisms for ensuring that the respective populations of the region are kept abreast of the progress being made towards remedying the food security challenges confronting the region, these appear to be malfunctioning badly. Arguably the most prominent manifestation of this reposes in the fact that there has been no comprehensive update on the pace of progress towards the creation of the Food Security Terminal. This circumstance, has to change quickly.
There is a great deal to be said for the recent report regarding the interest of a Trinidad investor in “working with the governments of Barbados and Guyana” on the proposed food terminal. The real value of such a partnership would be the role that private sector interests can play in setting standards of efficiency and accountability, virtues for which Caribbean governments have, frequently, not distinguished themselves and which, one hopes, can be infused into the project.