With the Caribbean seemingly having ‘gone quiet’ following a period of energetic assertiveness about a region-wide Food Security Plan to push back concerns voiced at the level of various UN food-related agencies regarding the region’s seeming diminishing food sufficiency bona fides, it would appear that, for the time being, at least, some member countries of the regional grouping are seeking to take more direct responsibility for their own food self-sufficiency.
The October 9 issue of the Trinidad Guardian reported that local farmers may be looking to their own domestic efforts to revitalize their agriculture sector even as the broader farm production regime promised under the Plan appears, seemingly, to have slowed down considerably. Perhaps, the most pointed example of a stall in the process has been the protracted information blackout on the creation of a Regional Food Security Terminal, a facility designed to serve as a storehouse from which to effect emergency food relief efforts in times of crisis.
Recent reports from Port-of-Spain indicate that, for the moment, at least, the substantive interest among farmers in the twin-island Republic is on looking inwards for food self-sufficiency through the twin-island’s own agricultural resources. While this does not mean that the overarching regional food security plan has been set aside it may well point to a mounting anxiety that the seeming uncertainties in relation to the effective readiness of the facility for immediate or even medium term to support food security emergencies in the region is ‘an unknown quantity’ at this time.
Recent food-related discourses among farmers and agriculture specialists in the country assert that, according to The Guardian report, point to farmers’ concern with food security as it pertains to their own domestic food sector, some of the issues being contemplated including whether the local coconut industry can “return to its glory producing an abundance of nuts” and whether the country can rely on its rice industry for a steady supply for citizens.
Given the fact that there has been no recent official pronouncement on how the regional food security programme has been faring, up to this time, revelations like the reported discourses “among farmers and agricultural specialists” reported in the Saturday October 5 issue of The Guardian reportedly surrounds plans for the revitalization of several food-related industries “including cocoa, livestock, fisheries, rice, coffee and coconuts” that point to the likelihood that the island’s food security ‘watchers’ are not prepared ‘to ‘die wondering’ over the status of the once highly touted regional food security plan.
Plans for revitalization of the aforementioned industries were reportedly unveiled by the country’s Minister of Finance Colm Imbert in his recent budget presentation. Specifically, Imbert was quoted as saying that Trinidad and Tobago was “providing the necessary support to boost production in key subsectors including cocoa, livestock, fisheries, rice, coffee and coconuts.”
That there has been no word for several months on the once highly touted Regional Food Security Plan, the overseeing of which has been assigned to Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali and Barbados’ Prime Minister, Mia Mottley. Absence of any information regarding the Plan may well have had a bearing in what appears to be the recent jitteriness of Trinidad and Tobago over what they now see as regional food security sitting in limbo.
What has made the situation in relation to regional food security even fuzzier is the recent intervention of Hurricane Beryl along the absence of an informed comment from CARICOM up to this time regarding the extent the presumably still ongoing assistance to those countries in the region most affected by Hurricane Beryl and which are likely to further reduce the pace of progress in remedying the region’s substantive and overarching food security deficiencies.
