While the Caribbean island of Grenada has shown no indication that it wishes to separate itself from the ongoing Caribbean-wide regional food security initiative, the CARICOM member country has been taking initiatives which suggest that, quite apart from its commitment to the wider regional food security undertaking, its own home-grown initiatives to help shore up the island’s food security bona fides may well do the island a power of good in the final analysis.
The Caribbean as a whole may have responded to concerns raised at the levels of various international organizations regarding the fragility of the region’s overall food security bona fides, however, it has to be said that while regional governments appears to have gotten out of the blocks fairly smartly, the pace would appear to have slowed considerably at the junction of the establishment of a Regional Food Security Terminal. While the Government of Grenada has traditionally vested in its Ministry of Agriculture responsibility for food security, its capacity for food production, the vigor of the country’s agriculture sector notwithstanding, still does not, at this stage, get the island altogether over the line insofar as its food security bona fides are concerned.
In its April 12 issue, the Stabroek Business published an article headlined ‘Vulnerable Grenada forging ahead with its ‘own’ food security template’ which strongly suggested that while the ‘Spice Isle’ was on board with the rest of CARICOM in the matter of a cohesive regional food security initiative, spearheaded by Guyana and Barbados, it was not about to ‘die wondering’ in the matter of its own food security needs and its responsibility at the levels of the government and the people to undertake such mitigating initiatives as it could. It is against this backdrop that the Stabroek Business published its article as Grenada forged ahead with its ‘own’ food security template’ in which it envisaged the fashioning of a ‘Food Security Crisis Preparedness Plan (FSCPP)’ that would “define what constitutes a major food and nutrition security crisis for the country in the event of a national/domestic hazard, or external shocks such as a global health pandemic.”
Here, we had no doubt that much of the thinking behind Grenada’s FSCPP had derived from the goings-on at the level of the wider region and that the decision made by the Grenada Government might have been influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by the less than brisk pace at which the broader food security undertaking, spearheaded by Guyana and Barbados, was moving. That apart, and as the Stabroek Business had mentioned in quite a few previous issues, there had been, up to that time and up to today, no update of any kind on the matter of the pace of progress towards the realization of a Regional Food Security Plan.
The last thing that this article seeks to do is to suggest that Grenada had ‘cut loose’ from the broader regional food security undertaking even though it is also together reasonable to suggest that as one of the likely more vulnerable countries, it might have taken the decision out of a conviction that where the vital interests of its population are concerned, its particular vulnerability compelled it to undertake an initiative, as a responsible government, to put the interest of its population first. While the Stabroek Business has received no follow-up so far on just how far Grenada has gone in its effort to fashion an undertaking which – whatever happens at the regional level – will help to upgrade its food security bona fides, we in the rest of the region still await word from Prime Minister Mia Mottley and President Irfaan Ali on the status of the planned Food Security Terminal. As the saying goes, this is decidedly ‘bad form.’
