Pity indeed that 2021, the year designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables (IYFV), had to coincide with a period when we are confronted with one of the sternest global challenges of our time, that is, the challenge of pushing back the scourge of the coronavirus pandemic. There are those who would argue – and it is a persuasive argument – that the role that fruits and vegetables play in staving off hunger and malnutrition amongst large swathes of the global population, particularly in poorer countries, is a matter that is no less deserving of worldwide attention than the ravages of COVID-19, even though the nature of the pandemic compels us to come to terms with the need for behaviour patterns that narrow our options in terms of public conduct.
Setting aside the fact that IYFV provides an opportunity for countries across the world to ‘celebrate’ the virtues of fruits and vegetables in their respective ways, it also allows for groups of countries, like the member countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), to fashion our own unique initiatives to celebrate the bounty of fruit and vegetables with which the region is blessed. Contextually, it is more than worth alluding to the role that fruits and vegetables can play in significantly reducing what has become, over the past decade or so, an economically draining food import bill that is now reportedly hovering somewhere in the region of US$5 billion.
There is more. A planned regional focus on IYFV might also include the rolling out of longer-term strategies to press our fruits and vegetables into service not just to enhance the region’s international markets but also to further integrate our fruit and vegetable production into the region’s agro processing sector. We can go further, fashioning initiatives that can diligently probe the role that fruits and vegetables have to play in our diets as Caribbean people in response to mounting concerns about our prevailing eating habits and the consequences of these for the health of the people of the region.
One might add, of course, that, for Guyana, IYFV provides an opportunity to help further validate the long-held notion that we are, indeed, the ‘food basket’ of the region. We could have done this – the strictures of COVID-19 notwithstanding – by pushing, several months ago, through CARICOM, for the ‘celebration’ of IYFV in a manner that would have optimized the opportunity for the burnishing of Guyana’s profile as a producer of some of the world’s celebrated fruits and vegetables. Contextually, IYFV may well have been an opportunity for Guyana and the Caribbean to shine, COVID-19 notwithstanding.
As for Guyana, the country that can, more than any other within CARICOM, lay legitimate claim to being the regional front runner insofar as fruits and vegetables cultivation is concerned, it took the Ministry of Agriculture, more than a quarter of the year in which IYFV is being celebrated to effect a formal launch to the national programme. Even then, what eventually materialized as a national programme of activities to mark IYFV appeared to be thin-on-the-ground, to say the least, even when account is taken of the restrictions that would have had to be applied as a result of the pandemic. There is, for example, no evidence whatsoever, of a serious attempt to underscore Guyana’s considerable reputation as the regional leader in fruit and vegetable production and to shine a light on the role that these play in our diet, our culture and our economy.
We say, again, that in the circumstance of COVID-19 there would have bound to have been a certain hedging of bets insofar as events like Fruit and Vegetable Fairs and Farmers Markets and other public events are concerned, though one feels that in its conceptualization, the programme could have been fashioned on a much broader canvas, making allowances for (for example) opportunities for the work of fruit and vegetable farmers across the country to come to major national attention in the media. Indeed, it is still not too late, we believe, for the infusion of such an element into the already announced programme that recognizes and rewards fruit and vegetable farmers and agro processors deemed to have made noteworthy contributions in their respective pursuits. At the same time, there is, conceivably, room for affording agro processors (whose end products depend largely on fruit and vegetable inputs) opportunities to benefit from media-driven product-promotion opportunities that ‘work around’ the pandemic and could compensate, to some degree, for the lean times that have been visited upon the agro- processing sector by COVID-19.
Even with a third of the IYFV having already gone by and given the region-wide distractions of COVID-19, the approaching hurricane season and the prevailing travails of CARICOM member state St. Vincent & the Grenadines, it is still not too late for CARICOM to fashion and properly execute a longer-term agenda that links fruits and vegetables to healthy eating, boosting regional exports in both fruits and agro-processed commodities, reducing the region’s food import bill and seeks to infuse fruits and vegetables into a regional health and wellness policy. Such an undertaking, we believe, is by no means beyond the expertise to be found in the region.
