While Caribbean Community (Caricom) governments are showing signs of a greater sense of earnestness in their pursuit of enhanced levels of food security, the realisation of that goal continues to be threatened by huge expenditures on high volumes of imported foods.
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Resident Representative in Guyana Dr Lystra Fletcher-Paul told Stabroek Business in an interview last week that while governments in the Caribbean were becoming seized of the importance of making greater investments in domestic agriculture, the region was still faced with a food import bill totalling more than US$4.25 billion annually.
According to Dr Fletcher-Paul while there was unmistakable evidence that regional governments had become more mindful of the importance of paying more attention to domestic and regional food security, progress in that direction was still “too slow”. The FAO official said that apart from the fact that food production in the region was still not keeping pace with
