It would be altogether fair to say that this year, Caribbean Agriculture Week (CAW) which is being staged in The Bahamas from October 9th – 13th, ought to be, for obvious reasons, one of the more important regional gatherings of any kind to have been staged in recent years. Put differently, there is, truth be told, little to shout about in circumstances where, just a few months ago, the region had been hit with the unflattering news that for all its bluster, it was, in fact, lacking in any really meaningful food security, or that, at the very least, a great many of the countries comprising CARICOM had been afflicted by a condition of food insecurity. To make matters worse there does not exist a great deal of evidence that the pronouncement on our food security bona fides had ‘sunk in,’ certainly not in circumstances where, following various calls in recent months for a progress report on the much vaunted Regional Food Security Terminal, including quite a few from this newspaper, we have not heard a ‘peep’ out of either Bridgetown or Georgetown, a circumstance that puts the CAW 2023 event in a position where it must, surely, tell the region exactly what is going on insofar as the full and final completion of the infrastructure for the Terminal is concerned.
Those issues apart, there is, of course, the expectation that CAW 2023 will update us on not just the pace of progress towards the realization of the much vaunted 25×2025 target, but on the extent to which the food security scares that have been visited upon the smaller, more food-dependent countries of the region, have now receded. There is, as well, the need for a wider report, from the front-running food producers of the region, regarding their preparedness to ‘pitch in’ to help place the food security bona fides of the Caribbean on a condition of even keel. So that while we expect that The Bahamas event will be attended by formalities that are likely to include presentations of a political nature as well as the various perspectives of agriculturalists on what it would take to enhance the region’s food security bona fides and reduce its dependence on extra regional food imports, the success of the event must be seen, much more, in the context of the nuts and bolts issues of regional food security, like the fashioning of a much more robust, region-wide agricultural sector and a regional food security ‘umbrella’ which the Barbados-based Food Security Terminal is expected to represent.
Guyana, particularly as well as other countries in the region, notably Trinidad and Tobago will have to put their cards on the table, in the matter of their support for the wider regional food security effort. If there is nothing wrong with the theme for CAW 2023 – Accelerating Vision 25 by 2025” – we have grown much too accustomed to the modus operandi of Caribbean governments to be persuaded that they may not simply go through the rituals associated with CAW 2023 (making fleeting references to 25×2025 in the process) and, afterwards, all assume as-you-were positions in their respective capitals, as though CAW 2023 were not just ‘a break’ from their domestic routines. As it happens, however, the whole idea of a Caribbean Agriculture Week, this year, confronts us with the full extent of the food security crisis which much (perhaps most) of the region faces, placing before us, arguably in a manner that is almost certainly unprecedented, just where we stand at this time and the measures that we are obliged to take to support our long-term survival as a Caribbean nation.
