It was only towards the end of 2021 that the bald facts of what we now know to be the paucity of the Caribbean’s overall food security bona fides were known. This included the revelation in one report that we were confronted with “increasing levels of overweight, obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs)” and that as a consequence were facing a “persistent problem of acute and chronic under-nutrition and deficiency diseases”. Prior to then, the Caribbean, at least much of it, had always tended to be somewhat starry-eyed about its food security bona fides, transforming what, in some instances, were no more than chimeras into a song and dance that caused us to appear to be what, decidedly, we were not. This practice has been decidedly ingrained at the level of officialdom.
Important regional food security gatherings tend to be decorated with attractive food displays and sometimes, modest markets where the most that you could acquire were sample-sized helpings of products that were not being produced in anywhere near the volumes in which they were required to enable the widest access and better still, to help to underscore our food security bona fides. Symbolism at its highest. As for the ‘sit downs’, intended to delve seriously into our food security challenges and to determine the means through which they can be mitigated, these have, all too frequently, been adorned by excessive doses of hyperbole, their conclusions adorned by what often appears to be ‘final communiques’ drafted long prior to the conclusion of the discourses and therefore, substantively, pre-empting the real outcomes. Such communiques are commonly littered with high-sounding commitments, most of which, perhaps, never see the light of day.
Indeed, the critical amongst us may well query the choice of one of CARICOM’s most alluring territories, The Bahamas, as the location for the staging of Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) 23, given, on the one hand, the compelling tourist attractions (distractions in this context) of the country, and on the other, the critical importance of a forum that could have serious implications for the food security bona fides of the region. If The Bahamas may ‘well do’ for ‘delegates’ with only modest workloads, the optics of such a circumstance may well cause questions to be raised about the seriousness of the undertaking, in the first place. If this is by no means an attempt to pour ‘cold water’ on CWA 23 before it even gets underway, it certainly seeks to send a message to the forum that there is now sufficient evidence that where food security is concerned, the region, or at least much of it, is caught in a genuine quandary and that the deliberations in The Bahamas must deliver a great deal more than what, previously, have been stirring but overwhelmingly undelivered undertakings that gatherings of this nature, held elsewhere, have ‘served up.’
During the course of CWA 23 and for some time after, the media will, of course assail us with the undertakings arising out of the discourses and may even seek to provide their own prognoses for the outcomes of the gathering. If those have a relevance in terms of us being informed of the pronouncements and the essence of the deliberations, what is important is how quickly and single-mindedly the governments of the Caribbean move to aggressively implement the undertakings articulated at the forum. It is the follow-up to the forum rather than what are likely to be the wordy undertakings/commitments articulated in Nassau that are important here.
