No update on our food security terminal has become a leadership issue
Numerous calls by the Stabroek Business over the past several months for a progress report on the extent of the progress being made in the matter of the creation of the promised regional food security terminal have consistently fallen on deaf ears. We have ‘called out’ President Irfaan Ali and Prime Minister Mia Mottley and their respective Ministers of Agriculture on both the promised Terminal and on the pace of progress towards the realization of the overall push to strengthen the region’s food security bona fides, as a whole. On that score, too, there has been a stony silence.
If the foot-dragging in the dissemination of information from the leadership of CARICOM countries to the people of the region, as a whole, is often attended by a fair measure of foot-dragging and dilatoriness, surely, one is entitled to expect that exceptions would be made in instances of particular importance. The matter of being brought up to date with just where we are as a region insofar as our food security bona fides are concerned ought surely to be a case in point.
As this newspaper has pointed out from time to time, our request is not for a comprehensive update across the various aspects of the overall food security initiative. What we seek are incremental updates which, hopefully, would be reassuring. If the pace of progress is perhaps slower than what we might expect or hope, the fact that there is some measure of forward movement and that the overarching realization of an enhanced food security status remains a realistic target is a thousand times better than simply being left in the dark insofar as the Terminal is concerned which, for several months now, has been the case. If there can be no question that the ‘lead’ Heads have been preoccupied by matters of individual and collective critical importance, one might have thought that the CARICOM Secretariat might have been assigned to provide periodic, measured and, hopefully, uplifting reassurances in the matter of how the process is proceeding. That is an option which, it appears has been set aside.
The problem that arises here is that the food security issue is not one that allows the region to indulge in what, far too frequently, are exercises in ‘foot-dragging’ on critical issues. Here the point should be made that while the ‘better off’ countries in the region – and we venture to name Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados as part of that lot – are not acutely threatened by food insecurity at this time the same, one suspects, cannot be said to apply in the instances of many of the smaller member countries of CARICOM whose food security standings are, we are told, threadbare almost to the point of being non-existent.
What we find acutely disturbing is that there have been, over the past year, gatherings of CARICOM Heads and Ministers of Agriculture that may well have been ideal at which updates on the Food Security Terminal may have been forthcoming. Here we cite the instance of the October 9-13 Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) held in The Bahamas and which was attended by the Ministers of Agriculture of the countries charged with the pivotal responsibilities insofar as the regional food security was concerned. While there could hardly have been a more fitting opportunity for an update on matters pertaining to the food security issue nothing of substance arose from that forum. Beyond that we have already made mentioned (in our November 10, 2023 editorial) of the meeting in Georgetown between Messrs. Zulfikar Mustapha and Indar Weir the two ‘lead’ Ministers of Agriculture in the region in the matter of the food security initiative arising out of which we were not afforded a ‘peep’ on the regional food security issue.
That up to the final full week of 2024 and despite incessant enquiries there has been no response from either the lead President and Prime Minister or their Agriculture Ministers is, to say the least, unacceptable, particularly since the wall of silence on the pace of progress in the matter of the Food Security Terminal may well, not for the first time, raise questions how we in the Caribbean, including our leaders, do not recognize that the noise in the market is never the sale.