March FAO forum must deal frontally with Caribbean food security initiative

With the March 18-21 staging in Guyana of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 38th Regional Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean (LARC38), the point cannot be made too strongly that the forum should not be allowed to metamorphose into stirring speeches, animated ‘talk shops’ and a final communique that talks a great deal but says little, if anything.

Here, we must begin by acknowledging what is widely believed to be an incurable propensity by Caribbean bureaucrats to transform important deliberations on critical issues into ‘talk shops’ that accomplish little beyond the selfaggrandizement of the assembled ‘high officials.’

The FAO forum, it should be noted is being staged at a time when the issue of regional food security is, arguably, CARICOM’s most pressing collective concern. While one is aware that an initiative is underway to address the issue there now exists a fair measure of concern as to whether the pace of progress in cutting through the issues that are negatively impacting on our food security bona fides is occurring at a sufficiently rapid rate,

Perhaps now more than any other time in the recent history of the region what is needed, but has not been forthcoming up to this time, is, plainly and simply, a candid assessment of just where we are at this time insofar as our much vaunted regional food security undertaking is concerned. The Stabroek Business says for the umpteenth time that we need an update. This has not been forthcoming.

Here the point should be made that it was Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali, one of the two ‘lead’ Heads of Government on the Caribbean Food Security initiative whose “a lot more needs to be done” remark back in September last year appeared to be seeking to send an unmistakable signal regarding the reality that up until that time the region had ‘come up short’ in the way of accomplishment of any of its food security goals.

The recent visit to Guyana by Assistant Director General and Regional Representative of the FAO, Mario Lubetkin was intended to raise the curtain on a forum which, a Ministry of Agriculture release has said “will focus on financing to end hunger, technological innovations to reduce post-harvest loss of food waste, and the adaptation and mitigation of the effects of climate change for a sustainable agriculture system and food security”. The Conference, the release added, “will also address access to financing mechanisms to facilitate national programmes, promote technological transfers and capacity building, and end food hunger and malnutrition among children in the region.” If it would be altogether delusional to expect that such a weighty agenda can be properly addressed, this is what, we are told, the FAO forum in Georgetown will set out to do. Any end-of-forum communique that lays claim to having covered meaningful ground in all of the aforementioned areas will surely amount to little more than a meaningless contrivance.

Here one might have thought that much of the forthcoming FAO forum might be better spent (taking advantage of the presence in Georgetown of senior FAO and CARICOM officials) exploring such ‘fault lines’ as might exist in the unfolding initiative

to address what we now know to be the ‘dodgy’ food security bona fides of the region. The problem there, perhaps, is that some of our regional bureaucrats might now consider the topic of Caribbean Food Security to be ‘old hat’ at this stage and that it now offers little if any room for the kind of theatre to which politician and bureaucrats have grown accustomed. If we really want to ensure that something meaningful comes of the Georgetown FAO gathering we would do well to cause the agenda to include a frank and honest assessment of just where we are in terms of the (unfolding?) regional food security initiative and the current information dissemination deficit. An FAO forum in Georgetown that fails to take account of responses to questions which the people of the Caribbean most need answered about food security is likely to be of only minimal interest to them. It is not too late, one feels, for a disclosure from the organizers providing assurances that the George-town FAO forum will realize a comprehensive and reassuring pronouncement on just where we are insofar as the ongoing regional food security initiative is concerned.