The Caribbean has always had a proclivity for deploying hype and hoopla in its promotion of goals/targets set in pursuit of some pre-determined development-related objective. Here, they frequently opt for ‘feel good” approaches to the application of this strategy, not infrequently, steering clear of what, sometimes are the harsh realities associated with the realization of the said target. Contextually, the matter that comes easiest to mind at this juncture is the region’s 25×2025 reduced food importation goal.
On the whole, the available evidence suggests that the setting and incrementally hyping up of targets and goals is a favoured approach by the region to ‘keeping their targets alive.’ Setting everything else aside, the much touted 25×2025 ‘formula’ for the incremental reduction of extra regional food imports has to be set against the ability of the region to significantly raise its existing food production bona fides. Here CARICOM member countries, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, particularly, are going to have to play critical roles if 25×2025 or even a less demanding extra regional food import cut were to be applied.
Guyana’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Ambassador Leslie Ramsammy at a World Trade Organisation forum stated that the 25×2025 undertaking has so far “managed to reduce the region’s food imports by 15 per cent,” while expressing confidence “that the overall goals of the initiative will be met within the time frame.”
Here one assumes that Dr. Ramsammy is speaking for the Caribbean as a whole. Ambassador Ramsammy also highlighted the successes since 2021 in Guyana in pursuing food security for the Caribbean by noting how the agriculture budget has changed. In 2014, he said that Guyana’s Agricultural Budget was $15.4b (about US$75m). In 2019, the budget contracted to $13.1b (about US$65m). In 2024, the budget is almost $120b (about US$600m).
The result, he said, is that rice production is set to increase to over 700,000 tons in 2024; Guyana is set to meet 100% of its needs for soya and corn by 2026/2027 and to become an exporter of soya and corn by 2028. He added that the country has rolled-out production of new crops to reduce imports and to also export, including millet, red beans, black beans, potato, onions, garlic, grapes, wheat, quinoa.
Even if Guyana, on its own, were to realize that 25×2025 target – and there is every reason to believe that we can – the question that arises is whether either Dr. Ramsammy, or the Government of Guyana, can speak with any measure of confidence for those other member countries of CARICOM, particularly Jamaica and Grenada, whose agriculture sectors have – in some instances – been ‘taken apart’ by Hurricane Beryl, leaving their food security bona fides altogether dependent on intra-Caribbean support, particularly from Guyana, and in the second instance, from extra-regional sources. Indeed the available evidence would appear to suggest that the region’s 25×2025 extra regional food import reduction target has almost certain been set back by Hurricane Beryl.
Here one cannot help but wonder whether, given the completely altered scenario arising out of Hurricane Beryl’s intervention, it might not be altogether advisable to apply a level of pragmatism by removing what, at this juncture, may well have become no more than hype and sloganeering which now appears to be all that 25×2025 represents at this stage. Here it has to be said that if no one is saying that 25×2025 was not representative of a sincere timetable, Hurricane Beryl’s role as a ‘spoiler’ demands that it now approach the 25×2025 timeline with a generous measure of practicality. Here, one might add that it is implausible that countries from outside the region (and here the United States comes immediately to mind) would have been ‘turned away’ by those CARICOM member countries that were victims of Hurricane Beryl and where the sense of emergency would have been sufficient to cause them to set aside the 25×2025 ‘food security’ target.
If it is altogether desirable that the Caribbean, as a whole, keep in focus the desirability of building a robust food security edifice upon which it can safely stand in the longer term, those targets ought not to be ‘adulterated’ by ‘pipe dreams’ that are likely to collapse to our disappointment, and more poignantly, to our pain.
The likelihood that 25×2025 will be realized now appears to be more than a little hype when the distraction of Beryl and the various repair jobs to the food sectors in much of the Caribbean is taken account of. It has to be said that it is important, that in this instance, a healthy measure of pragmatism be applied in continuing to push 25×2025 even at a time when Beryl’s intervention had eroded the food security bona fides of some of the more vulnerable CARICOM member countries. A timely reassessment of the overarching situation and the arrival of a decision that speaks to the 25×2025 reality is the way to go… if this involves a pragmatic adjustment to the 25×2025 target then so be it.