CARICOM: No good excuse for food security challenges

The twin factors of climate change and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on labour loss and its implications for the agricultural sector are among the primary factors that now bring the issue of food security in the Caribbean into ever sharper focus.

For decades the region has prevaricated over the need to collectively accelerate its food production capabilities, opting instead to an ill-advised over-reliance on costly food imports. Not only has the practice placed a taxing food import bill on the fragile economies of the region, particularly those countries whose food importation preferences are concerned with meeting the tastes of tourists, what it has also done is to give rise to concerns over diet deficiencies and illnesses located in what are believed to be ill-advised food consumption choices.

Three Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries, Guyana, Belize and Haiti, can be considered better positioned than their counterparts to lead some kind of collective charge in pursuit of a change in the status quo. Haiti, however, continues to be confronted with political, social and economic challenges that severely limits its ability to make a meaningful contribution to such an initiative. What has been demonstrated amongst the remaining territories is a certain leaden-footedness in moving forward. Successive commentators have pointed, correctly, to what they see as a mind-boggling dichotomy between the communiques, commitments, and ‘expert studies’ churned out by the region which are customarily dutifully followed by a mind-boggling lack of results-driven follow-up action.

There had been, several decades ago, a sort of regional understanding that Guyana was bestpositioned to be CARICOM’s lead country in pursuit of the maximisation of food production for regional consumption and export. As it happens, these kinds of intra-regional understandings usually become immersed in distractions arising from the individual challenges that arise in one (or more) CARICOM territories. In the instance of the highly touted proposed initiative by Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana to use the former’s investors and the latter’s agricultural infrastructure and know-how to kick start regional food security-driven investment in mega-farms, this fell victim to a series of seeming political fault lines which appeared not to have been anticipated initially.

However hard one tries, it is difficult to locate CARICOM’s overwhelming inability to become self-sufficient in home-cultivated foods in anything more than a pointed lack of self-motivation and political will coupled with a tourism industry on which several CARICOM member countries are highly dependent but which places those countries outside the zone of food security. Put differently, it is a question of putting the tourists’ tastes first. Though, in the instances of the tourismdependent countries, this is largely understandable… the question that arises is whether there has ever been any really serious and wholehearted attempts to shift visitor tastes closer to the region’s food production and culinary strengths.

Caribbean governments, as they are wont to do, tend to blow ‘hot and cold’ on important regional issues and one senses that for some key reasons, the issue of regional food security is being eased to the forefront again.

The first and most keenly discussed of those issues is the continual rise in the extent of the region’s annual food import bill, the latest figure being bandied about being somewhere in the region of US$5 billion. Whatever the accurate figure, regional food import costs are climbing as are the knock-on prices which local consumers must pay. In some of the smaller CARICOM territories the issue of food affordability has impacted sufficiently to as to negatively influence poverty levels in those countries.

Increasingly, concerns have arisen in the region about the public health implications of food consumption patterns that are weighed in favour of imported foods – not least those offered by the proliferation of mostly American fast food ‘joints’ in the region – as well as, in some instances, the drift away from healthy eating habits associated with the consumption of the abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables available in the region. Across the region, the generational shift in food consumption habits has been noticeable.

Then there are the natural hazards associated with climate change, not least the devastating seasonal hurricanes that sweep across the Caribbean, undermining the efforts being made in some countries to create robust and sustainable agricultural sectors.

Most recently, there has been the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic which has been a developmental game-changer for the region and which has impacted on the agricultural and agro-processing sectors across the Caribbean, creating scarcities in the availability of agro-produce and engendering an enhanced dependency on imported foods.

It has long been felt that a structured intra-regional approach to food security that assigns individual responsibilities to countries on the basis of their capabilities is probably the best approach to realising regional food security. Guyana, for example, with its abundance of arable land and its outstanding farming tradition can become the looked-to food producer in the region with the various other territories chipping in with such strengths as they have to create what one might call an agricultural collective. It is at this point, one feels, the fingers are pointed in the direction of the Caribbean Community, that is to say its fifteen member states. They can justifiably be accused of prevarication, endless ‘gyaff’ and overwhelming sloth in the implementation of intraregional agreements on food security-related issues.

These days, across the poorer regions of the world, a great many countries stand imperiled by the spectre of continually declining food resources and consequences that include starvation, malnutrition, and the wider attendant loss of capacity for development. We in the Caribbean and particularly Caribbean governments and the institutions that link the region, have no such excuse. -