The Stabroek Business’ decision to return to the theme of what we believe has been an inexplicable delay in providing an update on the pace of progress towards the establishment of the promised Regional Food Terminal is driven, primarily, by two factors. First, there is the fact that Guyana is one of the two lead territories insofar as the project is concerned. Secondly, we recall that Guyana has been at the forefront of at least one other regional food security initiative that never really saw the light of day.
In the matter of the failed earlier attempts at enhancing the region’s food security bona fides, it has to be said that Guyana, to a large extent and not altogether unjustifiably, was made to ‘carry the can’ for the earlier failure. From what we know about the challenges associated with the region establishing a Food Security Terminal, it ought to be clear that the full and final completion of such a project is unlikely to be a ‘cake walk.’ Here it has to be said that it is not only a matter of producing food but also of creating the requisite infrastructure for storage and for the challenge of moving food from one territory to another under circumstances that might constitute emergencies.
The fact that an exercise of this nature must, of necessity, be structured in a manner that allows for emergency-type responses, in some instances, means that it is important that we get it right. What is also important is that as the building blocks for the full and final completion of the project’s infrastructure evolves, it is only natural that the people of the region, particularly in food-insecure territories, would want to be kept abreast of how the project is proceeding and to be kept abreast of the timelines leading to the conclusion.
Here, uppermost in some people’s minds, is the fact that the region has previously failed to effectively execute projects that have had to do with regional food security and that this time around the project has been driven largely on account of the recent United Nations’ disclosure that here in the Caribbean, food insecurity is not a chimera. What we seek is acceptance on the part of CARICOM Heads that the critical importance of the Caribbean being provided with some sort of ‘cover’ from the food insecurity, which the UN says we face, is a request on which they have no option but to deliver.
This, of course, applies particularly to some (or most?) of the island territories with fragile food production credentials and which rely almost on extra-regional food imports. The reality is that in those circumstances a single event, perhaps an environmental one, can become a disaster. Here, there can be no question that those vulnerable countries would want to be kept abreast of the pace of progress in terms of the movement of the Terminal.
The fact of the matter is that unlike in other instances when the issue of food security has been on the regional agenda, we have now been told, definitively, by the UN that we are vulnerable. In this instance, fingers have been pointed particularly at some of the small-island territories in the region that are, in some instances, almost entirely dependent on extra-regional food imports. Contextually, there is every reason for some measure of jitteriness across the region regarding the pace of progress towards the full and final completion of the project, which is what the Stabroek Business has been repetitively bellowing about for many weeks now.
Indeed, we believe that the recent visit to Guyana by the Barbados Agriculture Minister, Indar Weir, would have provided an opportune moment for the two subject ministers (with the approval of their respective Heads of Government) to provide an update as to just where we are as far as the Terminal is concerned. Instead, and in circumstances where there seemed to be no other really pressing item on their agenda, they declined to do so. What Minister Mustapha, particularly, might have considered, in the context of the making of a disclosure on the issue of the Food Terminal, is that such a move might have gone some way towards shoring up his ministerial credentials, particularly in circumstances where his undertakings (the most recent one being in January this year) to use the New Guyana Marketing Corporation to find more markets for local agricultural produce have not yielded tangible results.
More than that, there continues to be question marks surrounding what would appear to have been precipitous pronouncements on his part on the state of readiness of some of the recently established state-funded Agro Processing Centres. All of this, and given the track record for CARICOM member governments for fluff and prevarication on the issue of food security, there is no reason, one feels, why the recent presence of the two ministers responsible for the execution of one of the most important projects that the region has undertaken in years could not have used the circumstance of their simultaneous presence in Georgetown to update the people of the region on just where the project is heading.
