Here we go again! Caribbean Ministers of Agriculture were due to gather in Costa Rica on Tuesday to discuss what the San Jose-based Inter American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) said are deliberations designed to discuss means through which food insecurity can be reduced and bridges built between Latin America and the Caribbean. This is what we were told in a July 17 IICA media release. Upon reflection, one doubts that there has been any regional issue that has been subjected to more exhaustive contemplation by member countries of the region, in recent years, than food security. After we would have had our food security ‘bubble’ burst by successive disturbing assessments by various organizations regarding the extent of the progress that we continued to make, including a boisterous undertaking by CARICOM member countries to reduce their extra-regional food imports by 25% by 2025, we appear to have settled down to wait to see whether that objective would be realized.
Along with the 25×2025 ‘formula,’ we had, earlier, embarked on other high-profile food security ‘jaunts,’ the highlights of which were eye-catching events in Guyana, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, and the launch last year of the Food Security Terminal initiative that helped to burnish the images of President Irfaan Ali and Prime Minister Mia Mottley as the ‘leading lights’ in the region insofar as the food security ‘charge’ was concerned. Here it has to be said that it appears that we, that is, the people of the region, as a whole, might have altogether underestimated the time it would take to get the Terminal ‘up and running.’ This newspaper has made the point that even if we accept the reality that no Food Terminal can be built in a day, this does not remove the responsibility of those centrally involved in the project to provide the region, as a whole, with updates on the pace of progress towards completion. This has not been happening. Since the issue of regional food security was discussed ad nauseam across the region, particularly over the past two years, one wonders what more could have been said in San Jose that has not already been said in Guyana, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and at various CARICOM ‘pow wows’ over, at least, the past two years.
The July 17 IICA release asserts that, in San Jose, the Ministers will “exchange views and information on the outlook for the agriculture sector in the various countries,” and will, as well, “discuss current and future IICA actions aimed at increasing the productivity and resilience of food production in Caribbean countries.” Really? If this is what the San Jose engagement was about then what on earth was going on during the last few years of engagements, some of them involving Heads of Government of CARICOM? After quite a few years of bellyaching over our food security vulnerabilities, the time has come for a redirection of the resources that have been, in recent years, allocated to ‘talk shops’ out of which have come little more than successive stirring but unfulfilled declarations. No one anticipated that the admittedly insightful idea of a Regional Food Security Terminal would materialize in a day, so to speak. Given, however, the strategic importance to the people of the Caribbean of a Food Security Terminal, at a time when there have been confirmed reports of fairly serious food security challenges globally, CARICOM must not only provide an immediate update on how far away we are from the Terminal becoming operational, but must also undertake to provide regular updates on the pace of progress towards completion.
That apart, if governments in the region believe for a moment that Ministers and high officials, running hither and tither, ventilating our food security challenges and not, afterwards, transforming those discourses into some kind of definitive action then they are sadly mistaken. High-level meetings to which there is little or no publicly disclosed and meaningful follow-ups are a complete waste of time and resources. What we need is not just the articulation of initiatives that are clearly linked to the regional food security focus but also clear timelines for execution. These must become an inherent part of the region’s food security pursuits. The question that arises here has to do with whether the Costa Rica jaunt took CARICOM member countries any further in that regard.
