Against the backdrop of numerous un-kept promises by Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Heads of Government, over several decades, to seriously ‘put heads together’ to find ways of reducing the volumes of our extra-regional food imports, the region continues to witness a continual climb in its food import bill. It is a mark of our collective failure that cannot be denied.
Upon reflection and given the stage at which the region finds itself today, there is a strong case for suggesting that the years of regional discourse on ‘food security’ were a complete waste of time since there was never any stage at which anything even remotely resembling an implementable plan to take us in the direction was ever ‘on the table.’ Quite to the contrary, the incremental increase in the cost of food imports over the years amounts to more than sufficient evidence that whilst talk about reducing regional food import costs was resonating across the Community, CARICOM member countries were calmly persisting with their customary food importation patterns.
Caribbean politicians possess a particular talent for selecting themes for high-sounding discourses which they feel are likely to resonate with their audiences. Over time, the ‘idea’ of maximizing food production persisted, growing into more expanded discourses that always, for obvious reasons, included Guyana. The talk persisted without any serious concern about the building of supporting structures. Simultaneously, no one seemed to pay any particular attention to the dichotomy between trumpeting collaboration in food production, on the one hand, , and with anther, in another, vociferously articulating protectionist tendencies within the region. That, frankly, has always been a dead giveaway. Still, what the political leaders have always known was that the idea of food security was, in itself, sufficiently noble to survive the reality of an innate indifference to its actualization.
That said, it is not a theme that will ever go away and with the regional food import bill now believed to be in the region of a few billions of US dollars (there really is no certainty about the numbers here) President Irfaan Ally has been, it seems, the latest regional Head of Government to buy into the idea of what a Department of Public Information media release termed ““across-the-board commitments by CARICOM Member States” to achieve the target of reducing food importation by 25 percent by the year 2025.”
The problem here is that we have long-traveled past the point where ‘high-sounding’ rhetoric trumps cold reality. The likelihood of the region importing 25% less food within the next three is unlikely to be realized. The region, frankly, has become far too set in its ways, and if the envisaged development trajectories of the respective Caribbean territories are taken account of, it would take a U turn of considerable proportions to anchor the region, as a whole, to a ‘food security regime’ that turns its back on imported foods to that extent.
There is more. Here in Guyana, there will always be evidence of a robust agricultural sector where, one feels, traditional small and medium-scale farmers will persist and where, in the instance of rice, particularly, there will continue to be a global demand that large investors will find attractive.
The question that remains to be answered, however, has to do with whether local perspectives on investment choices might not impact on small and medium scale agriculture in ways that we might not expect and where much of the focus of private sector attention might shift, decisively, into other areas that are considerably removed from agriculture.
There is nothing wrong with President Alli blowing the food security ‘trumpet.’ In more ways than one – and in whatever other directions our oil fortunes might take us – there is an undeniable wisdom in remaining anchored to simple agriculture-driven concepts like ‘grow more food.’ But there are challenges here too, the first one being that up until now, not nearly enough has been done by Guyana and by the region as a whole to create a collective mindset coupled with the institutional infrastructure to embark with a strong sense of mission on that journey. Certainly, here in Guyana, there is no real sense of the presence of either a conceptual or infrastructural framework that can provide a strong platform upon which a serious regional food security infrastructure can stand.
As it happens, we have long reached the point where high-sounding polemics won’t ‘cut it.’
Numerous similar exhortations by past CARICOM Heads of Government and various other high officials and technical personages have saturated the media, debated to death and afterwards disappeared like chaff in the wind. None of them have ever been met by anything even remotely resembling a robust regional response. Indeed, there are those who might even argue that there had never been any point in time when the issue of regional food security had ever been fixedly embedded into the forefront of the agendas of regional leaders.
