Food in the future

Up until now the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has seemingly not learnt many of the lessons of their continually spiralling food import bill and what appears to be the certainty of further increases in the prices of heavily consumed imported foods. While the Community appeared at one point to have been chastened by a 2009 food import bill in excess of US$3 billion, the regional quest for food security has not gathered sufficient momentum over the past year.

President Bharrat Jagdeo probably stands out among regional heads demonstrating a sense of urgency regarding the need for CARICOM to pay greater attention to food security as manifested in his personal urging that regional governments pay more attention to their respective agricultural sectors. At the same time he has made a succession of personal appeals for both regional and extra-regional investors to pay an interest in large scale investment in agriculture in the region. The fact that this appeal has met with little success at this time is due – in large measure, though not entirely – to the risks associated with investing in agriculture though Guyana now seems somewhat closer to realizing a crop insurance regimen that ought to reduce that risk and encourage more investor interest in the sector.

There are, however, formidable hurdles left to climb. At the Caribbean Week of Agriculture held in Grenada in October regional farmers raised the age-old concern about constraints to increasing volumes of foods produced in the region including a lack of commercial credit, high levels of organized crop theft, which, in the case of some Caribbean territories is sufficiently serious to have persuaded some regional experts that the propensity is part of organized crime and what one journalist described as “organized cartels” importing food into the region from North America.

The self-inflicted obstacles to a more robust regional approach to agricultural production aside, there are other concerns that are outside our control. Not least among these is the continually rising world market prices for commodities such as wheat and corn, both of which have a critical bearing on food production in the region. In the case of wheat, predictions of further price rises next year ought to cause alarm bells to ring in the Caribbean though it seems that Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica have embarked on an initiative to reduce wheaten flour imports by increasing cassava cultivation.

Then there is climate change. Regional experts no longer question changing climate patterns in   including increases in the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon and an increase in hurricane intensity. Expert evaluations of the impact of climate change on agriculture in the region are, to say the least, gloomy. Higher temperatures are almost certain to result in increasing outbreaks of pests, inhibiting agricultural yield while increases in extreme weather events – alternate droughts and floods – will usher in radical changes in productivity resulting from climate change, insufficient water and decline in water quality resulting from salt water intrusion. Here in Guyana, for example, the consequences of worsening climate change are likely to give rise to the need for radical reorganization of land use, changing crop patterns, changes in crop varieties cultivated and these, of course, will have significant economic and social impacts. Elsewhere in the Caribbean, particularly among island-states where changing weather patterns are known to have a far more devastating effect, the impact on agricultural production will probably be far worse.

All of this makes for a number of rather compelling challenges for the regional agricultural sector. Perhaps the most formidable of these challenges are those associated with fashioning a culture of farming that adjusts to the reality of changing environmental circumstances and, in the process, changing the traditional approach of farmers in the region. Here in Guyana, Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud told this newspaper recently that he was optimistic that farmers were beginning to come to terms with the fact that some of the old methods no longer hold good and are beginning to develop a practical appreciation and the new methods and technologies that need to be applied in an era of climate change.

Regional institutions like the Caricom Secretariat and CARDI have been making their own noteworthy contributions to helping to shape a regional agricultural regime that seeks to respond to the imperative of what is now customarily described as food sovereignty within the context of changing environmental conditions. Whether the work of the technocrats is being converted into a focused political agenda at the level of Caricom heads is another matter. One cannot help but feel, for example, that considerations of import substitution, greater commercial bank financial support for existing farming ventures and new ones, incentives for environmentally responsible farming methods and national campaigns that focus on buying and consuming locally produced foods is not high on the agendas of all of the regional governments.

In the circumstances, one cannot help but feel that in the final analysis the region – as it has done on other issues in the past – may well have to learn the hard way since, in most cases, food shortages will inevitably mean an increase in food import bills which the vast majority of Caricom countries clearly cannot afford. Perhaps it is still not too late for the region to see what may lie ahead and move to proffer a real and urgent response.