As is not infrequently inclined to happen in the Caribbean, we find ourselves – sometimes on account of no more than a lack of focus – becoming distracted on issues that are of varying degrees of importance either to individual member countries or to the region, as a whole. This occurs simply because we find ourselves with a weighted down agenda that compels us to undertake excursions into prioritization, the end result of which is that some things simply do not get done at all.
Around four years ago, when the various high-profile food-related international organizations including the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) sounded an alarm regarding indications that the Caribbean might be on the edge of a food security crisis, the news appeared to give reason for the Caribbean to respond with a regional ‘red alert’ that triggered a range of initiatives across parts of the region to amplify the observation that had been made about our food security bona fides and to attempt to put together a food security plan that would seek to create the physical infrastructure that would not just increase the volume of food available to the region but, as well, would create an infrastructure that would, as far as possible, provide a ‘safety net’ for the region.
The task of spearheading that assignment was handed to the Heads of Government of Guyana and Barbados, and as is customarily the case in the Caribbean, representatives of several countries in the region were mobilized to attend various events in Guyana, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, particularly. The ‘anointing’ of President Irfaan Ali and Prime Minister Mia Mottley as the de facto captains of the food security ship was followed by a surfeit of related of events in various parts of the region, including the two ‘lead’ countries and Trinidad and Tobago, all designed to underscore the significance of the effort and to cause the people of the region to get a sense that the leaders of the region were serious about the food security bona fides of the countries of the region, as a whole.
Much regional publicity was afforded the incremental rolling out of the ‘Food Security Plan’, not least the launch of a Regional Food Security Terminal and the staging of an assortment of related events in the name of the Caribbean Community. A point had eventually been arrived at when contemplations and discourses across the region, as a whole, never failed to ‘throw in’ the fact that the region was in the process of significantly shoring up its food security bona fides. Though whether or not the various food security ‘support events’ held in other countries of the region added anything concrete to the overall effort is debatable. It was President Ali and Prime Minister Mottley who secured the title of ‘Lead Heads’ and who, eventually, were to become recognized across the region as the champions of the undertaking to create a Regional Food Security Terminal.
The Stabroek Business has continually made its views known on the issue of the Regional Food Security Plan and here we repeat our view that the undertaking did itself no favours by ‘starving’ the people of the region of a sustained flow of information on all of the various aspects of the Food Security Plan. All of this when, first, international organizations like the FAO and the WFP had assumed an unrelenting position on what they felt to be a worsening condition of food insecurity in the Caribbean (as well as in other regions of the world in the absence of which the region’s food security would plunge into further decline).
One of the more significant ‘bends’ in the Caribbean Food Security Plan was the announcement of the planned creation of a regional food security terminal. Here again, the ‘lead territories,’ Guyana and Barbados, neglected, through their own national platforms to provide timely information on the Food Terminal assignment. Indeed, for a while, messages from the ‘lead’ territories underwent a drastic decline even as concerns were expressed across the Caribbean over the food security bona fides of some of the smaller territories.
While, presumably, the Regional Food Security Plan is still on the proverbial table, the ongoing food security challenges confronting the Caribbean, not least the protracted absence of any updated information of the Food Security Terminal is more than a mere slight to the people of the Caribbean. Particularly, in the instances of the smaller territories in the region with much less worthwhile food security bona fides, the situation gives rise to ‘life and death issues’ that could have been avoided if the administering of the food security undertaking had been more mindful of that fact.
Sloth and sluggishness in the execution of undertakings that are of particular importance to the very survival of some countries in the region have become par for the course here in the Caribbean which is why, all too frequently, we find ourselves gawking at accomplishments realized in other parts and wondering to ourselves why that ‘ain’t happenin’’ here.
