At his year-end press conference Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha, disclosed that the planned Barbados/Guyana Food Terminal, supposedly a critical cog in the wheel of regional food security is, after more than a year, still awaiting approval from the Town and Country Planning of Barbados and that the project will see development work this year. The disclosure by Minister Mustapha did not appear to be a planned one. It was proffered as a response to a question raised by the Stabroek News reporter attending the briefing.
The Minister’s was a vague submission on a regional project in which Guyana is playing a critical role and which is being touted as the most important food security undertaking in a region confronting its own fair share of food scarcity challenges.
The issue of quite why, after almost two years, a project deemed to be of paramount importance to the food security of the region is yet to secure the imprimatur of the Barbadian state agency is altogether unexplained.
It has been at least a year since successive reports on food security in the Caribbean articulated by reputable international agencies concerned with human development, including the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) began to send thinly veiled signals regarding food security challenges facing the Caribbean. Those messages pointed mostly to two considerations, first, the inability of the majority of countries in the region to arrive at a condition of self-sufficiency insofar as food production was concerned. The second consideration that came into the food insecurity picture had to do with limited household purchasing power among some of the smaller territories in the region and associated with the high costs of meeting their extra-regional food import bills.
While, in global terms, the Caribbean had never been seen as one of those basket cases, it had always been known that within CARICOM some member countries have been ‘skating on thin ice’ insofar as food sufficiency is concerned. Indeed, much earlier than the prognoses put forward by the FAO and the World Bank some of the reports that had been emanating from the health sector in the region itself had begun to point, worryingly, to food and nutrition-related health problems in some countries, (particularly among children) that were believed to be linked to food security considerations.
What had begun with a stern warning early in 2022 regarding the Caribbean’s food security vulnerabilities had, by September that year, mushroomed into hard data from CARICOM and the World Food Programme, including revelations in a survey undertaken by the two to the effect that 4.1 million people or 57% of the English-speaking population were facing “moderate to severe levels of food insecurity,” a figure that represented an increase of 46 per cent over the preceding six months.
If the particular food security vulnerabilities of the smaller territories of the region have long been known, the region, as a whole, it was felt, was always reasonably well-equipped help to fill the gap, Guyana, particularly, long presumed to possess sufficiently robust agricultural credentials to help compensate for the food security limitations of other parts of the region.
In 2023, however, both the FAO and the World Bank appeared to be unambiguously asserting that the traditional ‘formula’ for meeting the food needs of the region had to be revisited.
What, in effect the May 2022 disclosure that Guyana and Barbados would, jointly, launch a Food Terminal for the region did, was to send a clear signal that the region was moving to dissolve the axioms that had been associated with regional food security. In effect, it was a decision that challenged the region to significantly revisit its food security arrangements.
Nor could there be any question than that the fashioning of a new food security tapestry for the region had to be addressed with a sense of urgency.
Two points should be made at this juncture. First that there was no question than that the food security challenges confronting the region were both acute (in some instances) and therefore demanding urgent remedial attention and secondly that remedying the problem would, in itself be a significant operational feat.
The task of overseeing the creation of a regional food security terminal was handed to the Heads of Government of Guyana and Barbados, President Irfaan Ali and Prime Minister Mia Mottley respectively. In summary the assignment involved the creation of both structural and logistical infrastructure to ensure the each CARICOM member country benefit from a significantly enhanced food security regime.
Here, the overarching assignment involved the creation of a Food Security Terminal, the launch of which took place on May 22, 2022. In a presentation to launch the Terminal, Prime Minister Mottley was reported as saying that the Terminal may reduce the region’s food import bill by 25% by 2025% and that investment in the facility would allow for the movement of food from countries that are involved in mass agriculture production, not least, Guyana, to countries that were less blessed in that regard.
“We’ve got to perfect the logistics, and we believe that the investment in the Guyana/Barbados food terminal will be critical. We have the plans and the numbers we are working on,” the Barbadian Prime Minister was quoted as saying.
But Prime Minister Mottley did not stop there. She stated that she would convene a meeting shortly with financial institutions to deliberate on the establishment of the terminal, and other projects to ensure that affordable capital is available to state entities, and private sector individuals to be able to expand production and undertake logistics. The outcomes of these engagements are yet to be placed in the public domain across the region.
Significantly, Prime Minister Mottley had also been quoted in her May 2022 presentation that the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) has agreed to take the lead in this regard to see how the issue could be resolved.
As the Stabroek News has pointed out in various editorials and other commentaries, in the recent past, what we understand to be the importance of the Food Security Terminal to the well-being of the region demands that those responsible for the execution of the project provide reassuring incremental updates on the pace of progress of the initiative. Here, on assumes that the demanding schedules of the Heads of Government of the two ‘lead’ countries might have dictated that responsibility for keeping the people of the region briefed on the pace of progress would be the responsibility of their respective Agriculture Ministers. Here, one feels that the opportunity for a full briefing was palpably missed when Ministers Mustapha and Weir, of Guyana and Barbados, respectively, met in Georgetown last November.
The question that arises at this juncture has to do with whether what we have been told by both reputable international organizations and our own political leaders is the need to attach a sense of greater urgency to our food security challenge is being backed by a corresponding forward movement towards some measure of remedial/corrective action.
