Just under a year ago, a report in the state-run Guyana Chronicle of January 31, 2023 reported that the “Guyana/Barbados Food Terminal” (it is actually a Regional Food Terminal) was “taking shape.” The article reported that President Irfaan Ali and Prime Minister Mia Mottley had “visited the proposed area” where the Food Terminal will be constructed and that most of the preliminary work had been completed and that construction of the Terminal itself was on track; that update was attributed to Guyana’s Agriculture Minister, Zulfikar Mustapha. Back then, the Stabroek Business had recognized the sense of urgency with which Caribbean governments had attached to the setting up of the Food Terminal since the decision to go ahead with the project had appeared to coincide, roughly, with some of the soundings at both government and private sector levels with regard to the importance of the Terminal, given the warnings we had already been handed by the UN about the dodgy nature of our food security bona fides.
The entire Caribbean would recall that, first, the disclosure with regard to the intended purpose of the Terminal had been widely applauded across the region. Indeed, insofar as President Ali was concerned, his association with the project, alongside Prime Minister Mottley may even have served to illuminate his credentials as a CARICOM Head of Government. This newspaper recalls that in some CARICOM member countries, the media took to the idea of a Regional Food Security Terminal and (as was mentioned earlier) our own President’s credentials were ‘made’ largely as a result of the profile he acquired as one of the two regional ‘lead Heads’ overseeing a project that was envisaged as critical to the well-being of the Caribbean people. No one can justifiably criticize the region-wide positive publicity which the Food Terminal project attracted at its inception.
The extent of its importance was deemed to be in direct proportion to the extant food security challenges facing some of the smaller territories in the region whose economies did not possess a robust agricultural dimension. From the launch of the Food Security Terminal, to the various pronouncements regarding ways in which the facility might function, the project was closely followed in the region. What certainly gave impetus to the substantive enthusiasm for the project were the incremental ‘warnings’ that the region continued to receive from the World Food Programme (WFP) and other international organizations about the decline in our food security bona fides. Some of the smaller islands in the Caribbean, particularly, were beginning to genuinely ‘feel the pinch’ insofar as food availability was concerned and there had even been some soundings of reportedly genuine cases of food efficiency-related malnutrition in the region.
What these developments did was to throw an increasingly illuminating spotlight on the incremental importance of the Regional Food Security initiative and to create the need for governments and other relevant institutions to shoulder the responsibility to see the creation of the Terminal through. If a great deal had been done to bring the advent of the Regional Food Security project to the public’s attention, and to spell out its broad paradigms, momentum slipped dramatically. Here, it should be stated that while there was bound to be a period during which work relating to the actual creation of the Terminal was bound to supersede the noise over the project, it was critical that, given its importance, a channel through which the people of the Caribbean were consistently and thoroughly briefed on the pace of its progress was created. That responsibility in our opinion, should have been placed at the door of a regional team of functionaries working through or under the CARICOM Secretariat. That manifestly did not happen. But that is not all.
The failure of the region to use the recently executed Caribbean Week of Agriculture to provide a full update on the pace of progress towards the Food Terminal is unforgiveable, particularly given the fact that by this time, more warnings were reaching the region about the worrisome state of its food security bona fides. Arguably, there might have even been an opportunity for the two Food Terminal ‘Lead Heads’, both of whom (we believe) attended the COP28 Summit, where a number of other countries ventilated a number of other issues (including food security) that affected them. Here again, it appears that CARICOM missed the bus. In this newspaper’s most recent pronouncement on the issue, we commented that during their recent engagement in Georgetown, they missed the opportunity to afford the region a comprehensive briefing on the Terminal even though it has to be assumed that they would have been in a position to do so.
There is, it seems, nothing that seriously prevents CARICOM governments, through their Food Security ‘lead Heads’, not just to provide a thorough briefing on just where we are insofar as the full and final realization of the project is concerned and, beyond that, to establish a channel within the CARICOM Secretariat that can help facilitate such an initiative. Anything short of that, at this stage is comparable to what we in Guyana refer to as ‘sand dancing.’
