From its outset, the ‘high octane’ (somewhat glitzy) tempo that characterized the media reporting on the October 9-13 Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) was rather out of sync with the sense of doldrums and crises that have since emerged from the much more sober and serious assessments of the condition of agriculture, and by extension, the state of food security in the Caribbean.
Those assessments had been shaped largely by earlier warnings emanating from sources that included the United Nations about our food security bona fides. Those, the UN had warned, were decidedly, nothing to write home about. Contextually, it would have come as more than a mild surprise to many observers, including ourselves, to learn that the soon-to-be staged Caribbean Week of Agriculture event in The Bahamas appears to have taken on what one might call a more ‘up tempo’ promotional underpinning, strategically set, as it seems to be, against the backdrop of The Bahamas and its eye-catching tourism product.
The problem here is that if the extant circumstances warranted a tunnel vision that focuses unerringly on warnings that came from the UN, a year earlier, about the region’s questionable food security bona fides, the ‘spin’ applied to the event by the organizers suggests that The Bahamas event will provide attendees with a mix of touristy offerings and what appears to be an agenda populated with protracted deliberations on already repeatedly ‘worked and re-worked’ issues rather than seeking to focus faithfully on themes that has to do with solutions, first, to the food security challenges which, as a region, we now know, are staring us in the face. Caribbean bureaucrats have been known to ‘flourish’ in those kinds of situations. The more the plans for the Nassau forum unfolded, the more ‘throw-ins’ on an array of issues within the broader framework have occurred. These, inevitably, have begun to give rise to the threat that attention to the key issues might have become watered down by some rather less important distractions. Here, one thought, was the ‘beast’ of regional bureaucracy rearing its head again, to blot out that which had, hitherto, been deemed to be in our immediate interest.
What, it seems, the planners of the Nassau event have singularly failed to do is to clearly link the event directly and sufficiently tightly to the urgency associated with tackling the critical food security challenges confronting the Caribbean, not least, from what appears to be the particular hurdles which we face in seeking to extricate ourselves from what, in some territories, are very real and possibly long-term food security emergencies. If one were to balance some of the reported agenda items for The Bahamas forum against what we already know about the state of food security in the Caribbean, then questions ought to arise as to whether what appears to be shaping as the agenda for Nassau will be, ideally, what we are looking for. Nassau, it seems, is likely to be ‘littered’ with ‘huddles,’ many of which may run the risk of re-working, arguably, important, but decidedly ‘worn out’ issues that have been thrown in from previous ‘talk shops’ but have yielded nothing of substance. This leads one to think, immediately, that the proceedings in The Bahamas would have been shaped to ‘draw a crowd’ (as we say in the Caribbean), and to leave the rest of us to wonder whether, this time around, the chatter leads somewhere beyond the tomes of earlier reports that occupy cupboards and bookshelves across the region.
Up to this time, the publicity afforded the CWA event does not appear to be in sync with what we have been told for many months now has been the gravity of the region’s food security situation. If, indeed, the circumstances are, as they have been reported to be, then the Nassau assignment ought to be characterized by a regional rolling up of sleeves in pursuit of finding our way past the crisis. Deliberations ought not to be derived from discourses already worked across the region and whose ‘sell by’ dates have come and gone. With Caribbean Agriculture Week having the potential to serve as a timely forum for the strengthening of the pre-existing agenda for tackling the region’s food security challenges, The Bahamas can serve as part of a wider forward momentum. On the other hand, the event should not be seen as an opportunity to either rewrite the script or to altogether reinvent the wheel. Nothing, it sometimes seems, appears more favoured by Caribbean politicians and bureaucrats than going around in circles on critical issues like regional food security. The Bahamas forum should not be allowed to further concretize that propensity.
