Back in April last, news broke that Guyana, for reasons that had to do, largely, with the country’s access to large tracts of arable land, was to be the location of a regional food security terminal. The notification, attributed to President Irfaan Ali asserted that the initiative had “the support of other countries in the region”, including Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. If it would have been unreasonable to expect a ‘blow by blow’ commentary on the process of creating the Terminal, particularly from the President, it was altogether reasonable to assume that such a task, that is, the task of affording the nation and the region regular updates on the project would have been assigned to the Minister of Agriculture.
Here it has to be said that at the time when the decision was announced that a Regional Food Terminal would be built, the region was in the midst of what had been designated a food security crisis by more than one global high-profile international organization, sending regional Heads into a diligent huddle to fashion a response to what was evidently believed to be a crisis. News that the Caribbean was in the throes of a food security crisis had created a distinct sense of unease across the region, a circumstance that was attended to by a decision that the Heads of Government of Guyana and Barbados would be assigned the responsibility of ‘lead Heads’ in the search of a response to the problem. At the wider bureaucratic level, assorted regional experts and people across CARICOM were beginning to focus their attention on the need to address the problem with the requisite sense of urgency.
There are those who would argue that the regional response to the recognition that the Caribbean was facing a food security crisis, appeared to have been held up by a fair degree of regional dawdle, so that when it was finally agreed that the creation of a Regional Food Terminal would be one of the critical elements in the wider response to the crisis, some of the more food-insecure countries in the region had already begun to feel the effects of the crisis. There are those who would contend that the whole process of addressing the crisis dwelt too long in the realm of bureaucracy and that, arguably, the move towards the creation of a food security terminal took an inexcusably lengthy period before it finally came.
What was also painfully apparent was that the failure to create a mechanism through which the region could be kept abreast of the pace of progress towards the realization of the Terminal created huge gaps in communication between those responsible for the execution of the food security of the Caribbean and the people of the region, many of whom were already beginning to feel the effects of the food scarcity crisis.
That the Heads of Government assigned to lead the Food Terminal ‘charge’ and their suitably assigned Ministers to the project neglected up until recently to provide a single update on the pace of progress towards the completion of the Terminal, is truth be told, unacceptable. Here we should remind ourselves that for many of the people of the region, food security became a very real phenomenon so that the failure to disseminate pertinent information on the pace of progress towards the completion was altogether inexcusable. The urgency of the Food Terminal assignment certainly merited regular updates in circumstances where people in parts of the region were already being impacted by the crisis.
