Over many weeks, the Stabroek Business has been commenting on matters pertaining to the seeming lack of concern on the part of regional governments, including our own, on an issue which is of paramount importance … food security. This editorial is not about to launch into a tirade (which it has been doing, of late) about the indifference of the governments of Barbados and Guyana, particularly, to our numerous appeals for a helpful update on the matter of the Regional Food Terminal, not because we are unduly concerned over our failure, so far, to get a ‘peep’ out of either President Irfaan Ali or Prime Minister Mia Mottley (or both) on the issue. Nor are we going to take aim, once again, at what many Caribbean people must have seen as a veritable ‘junket,’ the recent Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) event out of which no really meaningful report has, it appears, reached the various Caribbean publics, Guyana included.
Here, too, there will be no lambasting of the Caribbean Heads, particularly the Heads of Government of Guyana and Barbados, and, as well, their respective Ministers of Agriculture, the latter duo having ‘sat down’ together in Georgetown a matter of a handful of days ago seemingly without recognizing that their simultaneous presence in the capital of one of the two ‘lead’ territories associated with the creation of the Food Terminal provided an opportune moment for the holding of a media conference to provide as comprehensive a briefing as they could. In the instance of Guyana, it can hardly be denied, for example, that the ‘noises’ that have emanated from the Minister/Ministry of Agriculture regarding the state of readiness of the various Agro Processing facilities across the country to begin to ‘throw down,’ (as we say in Guyana) has, at least in some instances, amounted to nothing more than hot air.
Beyond that, the ministry’s ill-advised proclivity for seeking to ‘sell’ the Guyana Marketing Corporation for far more than it is actually ‘worth’ persuades no one. What it does is to bring the ministry and the sector into a condition of considerable ridicule by deploying its enduring ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ approach to selling itself and the institutions under its control. To return to the issue of the Caribbean’s food security bona-fides, not least the 25×2025 target and the updating of the region on the pace of progress towards the completion of the Food Terminal, regional Heads of Government, ministers and state institutions have to ‘come better.’ If, as a region, we have had more than sufficient evidence that we can, in fact, successfully face down our food security challenges, one sometimes gets the impression that we are inclined to tackle this mission, frequently, at the level of pure theatre. Here, the vastly over-advertised CWA forum in The Bahamas and the various CARICOM ‘food for lunch’ fora, (while these may be useful as intellectual exercises) they have not, at least as far as we are aware, been meaningfully infused into the wider food security matrix.
One of the bigger challenges that have to do with ‘driving’ the development agenda of the region is the fact that the pace of progress is dictated, by and large, by a clutch of Heads of Government whose countries face different challenges and who, perhaps understandably, are often not ‘on the same page’ insofar as the menu of measures for an across-the-board package of remedies is concerned. There had been a time when some of us had thought of CARICOM as the means through which to keep us singularly focused, on the same page. Whether that remains CARICOM’s mission, or whether Heads of Government, themselves, had ever seen CARICOM functioning that way, in the first place, remains unclear. What is unquestionably true is not only that we are, these days, operating in a much smaller world in terms of common challenges (climate change?) but that smaller, less developed clutches of countries like the Caribbean cannot afford the luxury of the ‘showboating’ and ‘theatre’ that obtains in the socio-political culture of bigger, wealthier countries. Ours has to be a rolling-up-of-shirt-sleeves approach that sets aside that irritating ‘mimic men’ disposition through which we do no more than seek to persuade ourselves that we ‘have arrived.’ Here in the Caribbean we need leaders not ‘actors.’
