The successive ‘shock’ food security scares that have swept across the Caribbean over the past two years as part of a more global food availability crisis has compelled regional ‘experts’ and sections of the media to pay closer attention to the performances of the region’s agriculture and agro-processing sectors as part of a more holistic understanding regarding the evolving condition of our food security bona fides.
A few critical questions have been answered over the past year or so, arguably, the most important one being that it is the smaller Caribbean territories with weak agricultural bona fides and an excessive dependence on extra-regional food imports that are the most vulnerable amongst us. Accordingly, part of the region’s challenge, going forward, if the food security circumstances of the more vulnerable countries are to change, is to find ways of ‘weaning’ those countries off of their extra-regional ‘high dependency’ food-imports-condition and provide them with support towards the creation of their own (however modest) agricultural sectors that could at least serve as a starting point for reducing the extent of their extra-regional food importance.