It is by no means accidental that the 2024 Caribbean Week of Agriculture event is being staged in, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a country that not only boasts less than generous agricultural bona fides but is also still recovering from some of the worst excesses of Hurricane Beryl’s recent rampage. One of the more absorbing stories deriving from Beryl’s tirade focuses on one of St. Vincent’s smallest inhabited islands, Mayreau, “a dot on the map,’ according to one story, that “is so small that it’s barely visible.” Chillingly, the story goes on to assert that the impact of the hurricane “nearly erased it (Mayreau) from the map.”
What Beryl has done is to bring the future of the Caribbean, particularly its food security bona fides, into sharp focus. For the region and more particularly for territories like St. Vincent and the Grenadines climate change is, these days not just a weather-related phenomenon but one which could have implications for the food security and even the very survival of significant swathes of the region.