About a week ago, sections of the regional media delivered news that the Assistant Director General and Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), had addressed the opening function of the “High-Level Agricultural Ministerial Meeting” held in Kingston, Jamaica on September 18. The announcement came against what had already been a stack of regional high-level gatherings that had occurred this year alone to probe the state of health of the region’s food security bona fides in the light of the less than stellar reports that had been ‘turned in’ recently on the issue. It need hardly be said that our overall report card on the subject of food security is, up to this time, nothing to write home about. We were told that some of the smaller territories of the region are now seriously food security-challenged, reliant as they already are on extra-regional food imports and whilst the 25×2025 regional extra regional food import reduction target would appear to be at the top of the current agenda for enhancing the region’s food security agenda, we need a good deal more solid evidence that the region is on track to realize that goal. It’s hard to determine what, at this stage, is to be made of the planned Regional Food Security Terminal. The whole idea behind the Terminal, as we understand it, is to have it serve as a kind of ‘stop gap’ in the event that any CARICOM member country becomes seriously food insecure insofar as we already know that many of them are. If it was never felt that the Terminal would have been an overnight job, there cannot, in this newspaper’s opinion, be any good reason why given what we know to be the overarching regional importance of the project, we cannot be ‘briefed’ periodically on the matter of just how far away we are from having it up and running.
The problem with the ‘deafening silence’ is that it might easily cause Caribbean people to believe that it is one of those ‘gone with the wind’ initiatives for which the Caribbean has a healthy reputation. Truth be told, it now falls to President Irfaan Ali and Prime Minister Mia Mottley to provide the region as a whole with an account of just where we are insofar as the Terminal is concerned and whether, given the fact that the food security bona fides of some of the smaller CARICOM member countries with little or no robust food production infrastructure are really nothing to write home about. Then there is Caribbean Agriculture Week an event in which the Stabroek Business made earlier comments on that has to do with what we believe to be the incongruity with which the blurb and the boisterousness of the event sits alongside what, as far as we are aware, is the still prevailing food security circumstance. One has only got to match the ‘nice time’ aura that has attended the publicity of the event with the region’s gloomy extant food security circumstances to wonder whether the ‘returns’ from the event can be applied, in any way, to practically (and in a timely manner) address the region’s food security challenges. Perhaps a bit more enlightenment on the anticipated outcomes of the Bahamas gathering and such linkages as those having to confront what is, in fact, a regional food security challenge that is not (at least for now) going away, may change our minds.
