US expert tags reduced food imports as option for economic growth in Barbados

Dr Linda Tesar
Dr Linda Tesar

Against the backdrop of continually mounting region-wide concern over the difficulties being encountered by the Carib-bean in reducing expenditure of food imports, yet another high profile forum has drawn attention to the urgent need for countries in the region, both individually and collectively, to take resolute action to reduce food imports.

Addressing the Central Bank of Barbados’ 2019 Caribbean Economic Forum on Thursday May 23rd, the Bank’s Sixth Visiting Fellow, Dr Linda Tesar declared that an option for economic growth for the region’s leading tourist destination reposes in the initiation of serious initiatives to reduce its food imports.

The pronouncement echoes concerns that have resonated across the region for more than a decade regarding what observers say, is a heavy and deepening dependence on extra-regional food imports in preference to the consolidation by individual countries of its domestic food cultivation programmes, Barbados being among the biggest importers of foreign foods, mostly to meet the needs of the country’s steady inflow of tourists from metropolitan countries.

Dr Tesar, a Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, who completed a two-week visit to Barbados earlier this month, made a point during her address to the Forum, of drawing attention to the island’s heavy dependence on the international market for food. The significance of her observation reposed in the fact that her visit to the island coincided with prevailing concerns in the CARICOM member country over weak economic growth and a heavy outflow of foreign exchange for the purpose of meeting food imports.

“It is a small place and you go into the grocery store and almost everything is imported and at very high prices,” the American academic told her audience. Further extending her comment, Professor Tesar struck a chord with her audience, declaring that some of the food being imported into Barbados “can be grown here and things [can be] produced here in a sustainable way.” Her contention is that extreme dependence on global markets for necessities of life makes the economy and the island vulnerable to changes in relative prices and to external shocks. It is largely consistent with discourses that have been ongoing here in the Caribbean about the need to reduce food imports into the region and to embark instead on an ambitious region-wide initiative to collectively build an agricultural sector capable of meeting the needs of consumers across the region.

The envisaged regional initiative to curb its high-dependency condition insofar as food imports is concerned, revolves around taking advantage of the large land mass of some CARICOM territories, notably Guyana, a circumstance that has triggered intra-regional discourse on the prospects of collective investment in mega-farms and agro-processing facilities that can go a far way towards meeting the food needs of the Caribbean.

Professor Tesar’s comments ought to strike a chord not just in Barbados but in other CARICOM member countries that continue to be heavily dependent on food imports from outside the region in the light of the recent disclosure that a regional food import bill which, in 2018 was estimated at US$4.75 billion, could jump to US$8-10 billion in 2020.

Intra-regional discourse on the importance of reducing dependence on extra-regional food imports have proceeded largely at the level of rhetoric with ambitious-sounding plans that have envisaged Guyana as the driver behind significantly increased agricultural production with financial inputs from investors elsewhere in the region, including Trinidad and Tobago. These plans have largely become subsumed beneath other issues.

While Barbados continues to grapple with its high dependency on food imports to meet the needs of its crucial tourism sector, the discovery of large deposits of oil in Guyana and the anticipated major boost in the country’s economy has raised the issue of the importance of not falling prey to the lure of heavy dependence on food imports in exchange for an agricultural sector which, over the years, has ensured that the country’s various other economic challenges have not been made worse by a scarcity of healthy, locally grown foods.   

The article sets out what it says are five issues surrounding food security in the region, not least of which is the prognosis that its estimated US$4.75 billion 2018 food import bill is expected to increase to US$8-10 billion by 2020.  According to the report, while Guyana, Haiti and Belize are the only CARICOM member countries producing more than 50% of the food they consume, the present food import figure for the region represents upwards of 60% of total food consumption for almost all CARICOM members, with half of them importing more than 80% of the food they consume.