On more than one occasion over the past few months the Stabroek Business has been ‘wondering aloud’ as to whether it would not be altogether appropriate, including timely, for a region-wide report to be issued on the pace of progress towards the completion of the promised Regional Food Terminal, the creation of which, as we understand it, had been assigned to the Governments of Barbados and Guyana. Mind you, quite a while prior to the idea of a Food Security Terminal being mooted, the Caribbean had already been warned by the United Nations that its food security bona fides were weak and unsustainable and that this condition applied, mostly to those countries in the region with weak agricultural bases and were therefore heavily dependent on extra-regional food imports.
The idea, as it has been disseminated, envisages a kind of a ‘Noah’s Ark’ that would serve as a regional barn or storehouse to be pressed into service at those times when countries in the region face acute food security challenges. The high profile launch of the Regional Food Terminal back in May of last year had, in effect, placed on the shoulders of President Ali and Prime Minister Mottley, mostly, responsibility for the planning and execution of the project. Guyana, it had been determined, was the best positioned member state of CARICOM to provide the Terminal with a wide range of foods and (no less significantly) to provide short/immediate responses to food security emergencies in the wider region. Barbados’ role, it seemed, rose largely out of logistical reasons, to create the ‘Noah’s Ark and to enable some measure of food storage as well as to serve as a logistical hub that would spearhead the strategic considerations associated with the actual food distribution exercise.
If the launch of the Regional Food Security Terminal had attracted high profile attention across much of the Caribbean, affording the project a continually high level of region-wide public attention, that attention which the project afforded the Heads of Government of Guyana and Barbados during the earliest period associated with the launch of the project has failed to metamorphose into an initiative that allowed for a continued updating of the entire region on the pace of progress towards the actual creation of the facility. Indeed, while the region offered various fora including, a few weeks ago, the widely publicized Caribbean Week of Agriculture forum staged in the Bahamas to keep the region ‘up to speed’ on the project were missed. Perhaps the most recent ideal opportunity for doing so arose during the visit to Guyana by Barbados Agriculture Minister Indar Weir to his Guyanese opposite number, Zulfikar Mustapha.
Indeed, contextually, this visit appeared to be a surprisingly low profile affair and a shockingly missed opportunity for providing the region with a full update on the pace of progress towards the creation of the Food Security Terminal. Further, the region is now threatened with the eventual accusation of blowing ‘hot air’ on the issue of the Food Terminal. Here, the point should be made that Guyana, which is at the forefront of the current undertaking, has been tagged as being part of previous regional undertakings which failed to materialize. It should be noted that the current Regional Food Terminal undertaking is proceeding in an environment where it has already been established (by the United Nations) that many of the smaller territories within CARICOM already face real and significant food security challenges and may well, in the short term, require the urgent intervention of the Food Security Terminal. The question that arises, at this juncture, may have to do with whether the Caribbean may not be setting itself up for yet another failed venture.
