Cutting the clichés and getting on with the job

One can hardly have a serious quarrel with Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha’s reported assertion that a “single shared vision” is what is needed to protect the region’s agriculture and its food systems, which, in a sense, rails against the failures of the past, and presumably, issues a call for a more robust collective effort this time around.

One might add that there is an evident feeling of earnestness to the sense of urgency evinced in the behaviour of President Irfaan Ali and Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley (one hopes that other CARICOM Heads will buy into the relationship) which is one of the more uplifting positive takeaways from the recent 25 x 2025 forum in Guyana and the follow-up event in Barbados.

Those two events allowed President Ali and Prime Minister Mottley to engage each other twice in a matter of days, on their respective ‘turfs’, on issues that include the food security of the region, a goal which, it has to be said, their predecessors have not made a great deal of progress towards realisation. Over the years, of course, the worsening spectre of climate change has raised both the level and the urgency of the challenge even higher.

While it would not be wrong to embrace Minister Mustapha’s wish for that “single shared vision,” he ought not to be surprised if the utterance comes across as clichéd - a repetitive catchphrase - which, these days, is written into public presentations on matters to do with regional unity as a matter of rote with little mindfulness of the fact of its redundancy. If there is one thing that CARICOM member countries have not been particularly good at, over the years, is ‘holding one head’ – as we say in Guyana - on issues of particular importance to the region as a whole.

That “single shared vision,” of which the Minister speaks, must have been echoed in conference halls across the region ‘a million times,’ and yet, truth be told, no CARICOM Head of Government, up until now, has demonstrated either the stamina or the persistence to imbue the rest of the region with that “single shared vision.”

Over the years member governments of the Community have appeared far more preoccupied with inward-looking protectionist practices that retard the spirit of the free movement of goods that really ought to underline what we understand to be the spirit of the Community… which is precisely why President Ali and Prime Minister Mottley, with the support of other regional Heads like Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda, and Dr Keith Rowley of Trinidad and Tobago (providing GT and T&T can settle their market access differences) can work together to realise Minister Mustapha’s “single shared vision.”

Truth be told and as the Stabroek Business has asserted, not infrequently, that “single shared vision” has to begin at the level of CARICOM Heads, who, over the years, have had a tendency to suddenly depart radically from the spirit of the Community, abandoning important undertakings and retreating into their separatist corners.

What appears to have brought the region ‘together’ this time around is a confluence of circumstances including, particularly, regional food insecurity and climate change which, together, appears to have provided sufficient focus for at least some Heads of Government to bestir themselves.

The problem here, of course, is that while, one assumes, that the Community is, finally, seized of the nature, or more correctly, the scale of the challenges that we face, there is surely great merit, this time around, in going about seeking to fashion the requisite responses without infusing into that process the customary stirring clichés which serve no greater purpose than to help fill column inches, and to create ‘nostalgic’ recollections of our myriad previous failures. These utterances, these clichés, mind you, have customarily been put behind us no sooner than the purpose for their resurrection disappear into thick mists of failure. Frankly, if the region is to get anywhere close to crossing what are now the familiar (and not unrelated) hurdles associated with realising its food security against the backdrop of worsening climate change and, these days, global occurrences that impact on the region far more frequently, more directly than had been the case in the past, it is high time that we cease ‘mucking around’ with clichés which, these days attract nothing but public cynicism, and ‘get on with it’.

What the outcomes of the recent 25 x 2025 event and more particularly - the regional response to the event – exemplifies is the level to which the understanding that food security-related goal depends on Guyana’s contribution. On our part there are two requisites that are important. First there is the extent to which, as a country, as a government, we are prepared to throw ourselves into the leadership role in which we find ourselves. Our second responsibility is to equip ourselves with the requisite capabilities to accomplish the goals which, as a region, we set ourselves here in Georgetown and in Barbados. If we cannot accomplish these things then, sooner rather than later, we will be labelled as not fit to give leadership.

All things considered, there can be no question that Guyana has once again been cast as a regional leader, this time in a world which, arguably, presents more demanding challenges than had been the case previously. This, therefore, is an opportunity to measure up to our presumed abilities, something that cannot be accomplished through worn-out clichés that have no real ‘oomph’ behind them.