Caribbean Export urges greater use of technology to build regional food security

As global supply chain disruptions and logistics challenges occasioned by the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to impact accessibility to commodities, executive director of the Caribbean Export Development Agency (Caribbean Export) Deodat Maharaj has called for greater application of technology in the process of building food security for the region.

Maharaj said with many Caribbean countries already importing some 60-80 per cent of the food they consume and a regional food bill of over US$4 billion in 2018, there was now heightened need for us as a Caribbean region to lay the foundation for food security as an area of high priority.

“Given the already high levels of debt, increasing unemployment and more of our people falling into poverty because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, continued heavy reliance on imported food is simply unsustainable. COVID-19 by now has shown us that globally, countries put their citizens first as we have seen in the case of vaccines,” he said.

The executive director, while lauding a Caricom objective which seeks to cut the region’s food import bill by 25 per cent in 2025, said that this will require effective policy measures and incentives that favours a move towards more production in the region. He said that the region faced with the challenge of possessing inadequate land space to facilitate the level of production needed, we need to become innovative as we begin to embrace technology as useful to the process.

“For us in the Caribbean, the introduction of new technologies presents a major opportunity to accelerate food production, create jobs and attract investment. Embracing and accelerating the use of technology in agriculture or Agtech makes sense since it allows us to produce more with less, making food production more efficient,” Maharaj shared of his perspectives.

“In agriculture, innovations using technology, such as hydroponics and aquaponics have circumvented the need for extensive cultivable land, which is a major constraint in many of our small territories. The introduction of artificial intelligence, analytics, connected sensors, and other emerging technologies could further increase yields, improve the efficiency of water and other inputs, and build sustainability and resilience across crop cultivation, animal husbandry and agro-processing,” he added.

Noting that the slow adoption and wide scale use of new technology was a global phenomenon, countries such as Israel and the United Arab Emirates have been paving the way in leveraging technology in agriculture and getting the requisite investments to make it a success.

“For us at Caribbean Export, there is a path forward. We have worked with the Caribbean Association of Investment Agencies (CAIPA) to identify agtech as a priority sector to attract foreign direct investment as well as to stimulate regional capital flows. We have begun our work in concert with our partners to define a mechanism to position the region’s agtech opportunities to regional and international investors,” Maharaj said.

Caribbean Export in committing to the objective, yesterday concluded its first-ever Caribbean Agtech Investment Summit in which it highlighted investment opportunities that are available in the region’s agtech sector as it also sought to define a way forward in assisting countries to improve their agtech investment offerings.