A recent robust article emanating from the state-run Department of Public Information (DPI) titled ‘CARICOM’s food security agenda moving apace, says President Ali’, made no secret of the fact that its fundamental intention was to cast President Irfaan Ali in a leadership role insofar as the region’s undertaking to realise the reduction of regional food imports by 25% by 2025 is concerned. That, one supposes, is part of the DPI’s job.
Setting aside the fact that much of role of the government-controlled media agency is to burnish the image of the Head of State, what is also true is that Guyana, carrying as it does the mantle of ‘lead territory’ insofar as the issue of regional food security is concerned, cannot afford to play a secondary role in the process as the region seeks to realise this objective.
One feels, incidentally, that in Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, President Ali can hardly have a more able, strategic thinker alongside him as the region strives towards its 25×2025 objective. Indeed, even as she has thrown herself into the 25×2025 movement alongside the Guyanese president, Prime Minister Mottley has gone on record as stating that for the Caribbean, realising the 25×2025 goal will be no walk in the park.
Those of us who have grown accustomed to a Caribbean Community in which, often, more in terms of rhetoric happens than in terms of practical action, may well have been taken aback by the candour of Prime Minister Mottley. It departs sharply from the proclivity among CARICOM Heads to ‘talk things up’ and afterwards, to descend into protracted periods of foot-dragging in the area of actual implementation. They employ, during those periods of non-activity, time-worn clichés to cause the people of the region to feel that ‘things are happening’ when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
Nowhere has this practice been more prevalent than in the realm of initiatives that have had to do with regional food security. We have, over the years and with mind-boggling predictability, caused regional understandings reached on the issue of food security to descend into extended consultations, which, all too frequently, arrive at dead ends of technical studies and blueprints for action that end up in mothballs. What is perhaps most mind-boggling is that, over time, this has been CARICOM’s approach, tendered with monotonous regularity. Indeed, if one follows the trail of Caribbean food security undertakings over at least two decades, one is likely to find that what has survived those efforts are tomes of studies and a litany of dead ends. Guyana, one might add, has been particularly culpable in this regard.
Up to this time, it has to be said that – at least as far as the people of the Caribbean are concerned – the 25×2025 objective has been articulated largely at the level of rhetoric. It is difficult to identify any concrete/meaningful action that has as yet been taken that has moved the process forward. Indeed, one cannot help but think that while Prime Minister Mottley appears to be at the very heart of the engine room that seeks to kickstart the regional food import reduction initiative, her caution with regard to the challenge that inheres in what it will take to get us there is a function of the experience of precedent. We will have to wait and see whether the propensity which Caribbean Heads have demonstrated for much talk and no action in the matter of regional food security has been laid to rest or whether it has survived the litany of failed efforts.
What further fully justifies the note of caution expressed by Prime Minister Mottley is the fact that it still seems altogether unclear as to whether the region, as a whole, is on board the 25×2025 train. Indeed, quite apart from the importance of beginning with a body of conceptual thinking that sets out some kind of strategic road map for getting to 25×2025, we need to be sure that in pursuit of the objective(s) embodied in the 25×2025 idea, all of the member countries of the Community are fully and firmly on board. That is far from clear at this time.
One understands only too well President Ali’s keenness to seize the first real leadership opportunity that has been afforded him at the level of CARICOM. Indeed, there is little doubt that if he can successfully get the regional food security show on the road he would have succeeded where others before him have failed. That said, one wonders whether in talking up what the DPI describes as the President’s robust leadership in the matter of the 25×2025 assignment, the DPI is not, in effect, pushing the President ahead of himself and perhaps even preparing him for under-accomplishment and attendant disappointment.
