Still singing the same ’tasteless’ food security tune

The region is ‘on about’ its food security circumstances again. It appears as though the Barbados Agriculture Minister Indar Weir is sufficiently concerned about his country’s extant food security circumstances as to cause him to call (or at least this is how it seems) for the hastening of the creation of a regional Food Security Terminal, an initiative that emerged earlier and appeared to have had the support, principally, of the Heads of Government of Guyana and Barbados.

Here, and however repetitive this might seem, it is necessary to point out that proposals seemingly designed to strengthen the food security bona fides of the Caribbean are nothing new though one can argue that it is mostly the historic absence of long-term strategic vision on the parts of our political leaders, over many decades, that has caused us to be where we are today so that, contextually, we must at least acknowledge what appears to be a belated waking up of this generation of our leaders from the protracted slumber of their predecessors.

After their up tempo advocacy earlier this year for the Caribbean to bring a greater sense of urgency to addressing the food security considerations of the region, President Irfaan Ali of Guyana and Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados had their names linked to the creation of a Food Terminal for the region, a sort of ‘barn’ it seemed, for the accumulation of food for the region in the event that countries fell on hard times.

The initiative went as far as identifying an area of land in Barbados where the terminal could be set up and even sought to begin to create a logistical blueprint of sorts for intraregional food distribution as and when the need arises.

It is, frankly, the protracted nature of this failure and the seeming refusal of succeeding political administrations to learn from the underachievement of their predecessors that has been the recurring problem. Indeed, food security has become one of those issues that have most persuaded the people of the region that their political leaders have, in large measure, proven to be little more than proverbial bags of wind and much more about saying the pleasing thing than doing the right thing until forced to take real action.

We have, it appears, arrived at that juncture. The evidence of this having been borne out, first, in the wider global food security picture that has emerged from the punishing ravages of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. Setting that aside, there is, as well, the very recent assessments of the state of food security in the Caribbean which not only tell us that the region is far from where we ought to be, ideally, but also that the situation in some of those countries in the region that are far away from being self-sufficient in food production might even have reached the land of the precarious at this time.

Here it has to be said that if the situation is as dire in some parts of the region as one recent report (in which CARICOM was involved) puts it, then the setting of a target of reducing extraregional food production by 25% by 2025, on its own, is a huge smokescreen since what we are being told at this time is that, as we speak, there are households in the Caribbean that are – to put it bluntly – not getting enough to eat at this time. Indeed, a good example of just how serious the situation is at this time can be gleaned from the recent pronouncement by the Barbados Agriculture Minister Weir to the effect that the food security situation in his own country warrants an acceleration of the process of rolling out the promised Food Security Terminal.

Here, we can only hope and pray, as we say in Guyana, that the indications are now sufficiently clear that there is a need to significantly accelerate the actualization of this promised regional Food Terminal. There is every indication that the existing situation right here in a region that has always sold us a great deal of ‘hot air’ on the food security issue is, in some countries, serious, if not dire. The problem here, of course, even with due regard to the sense of urgency which President Ali and Prime Minister Mottley appear to have demonstrated in this matter, has to do with whether, in terms of the actual implementation of the Food Terminal idea, there exists a condition of readiness for immediateterm implementation. Here, it is apposite to note that while one expects that much of the food that will go to the terminal will have to come from Guyana, we have not, over the years, been exemplary pace setters as far as the creation of a robust infrastructure to address and help respond to the region’s food security challenges is concerned. This will, of necessity, have to change, since any food security ‘plan’ for the Caribbean that is rooted in consuming what we produce, is, truth be told, a pipe dream at this time.

Part of the problem here is that the institutions in the region (like CARICOM and CARDI) that are best positioned to take the lead in the building of a technical framework for the expeditious creation of a regional Food Security Terminal have not been as effective as they can be not only because they are essentially creatures of a Caribbean political culture in which the politicians are ‘in control’ and, by nature, ponderous in moving forward, but also because they, in themselves, appear to favour prevarication over expeditiousness.

The problem here, of course, is that the nature of the emergency which we are now told we face as a region demands a brand new outlook from both the politicians as well as the technocrats. Put differently, it is the outlook of the key decision makers at both the political and technocratic levels that must change if we are not to become caught up, permanently, in the singing of the same food security tune.