If there is an expectation among the people of the Caribbean that having recently made limited progress in raising awareness of the importance of strengthening regional food security, their governments and various institutions will automatically take the next step of providing clear and reassuring evidence of their collective intention to carry through with this undertaking, they are best advised not to take that as a given.
The Caribbean’s particular case for an enhanced level of food security is a microcosm of a wider, far more urgent clamour among huge swathes of the global population. In parts of Africa and Asia, particularly, the circumstances are far more critical than what obtains in the Caribbean.
The worsening of global food distribution resulting from what, up until recently, was a Russian-imposed blockade that suppressed the movement of wheat and grains grown in the Ukraine to other countries, notably in Africa, has served to further illuminate the urgency of the situation. The reality is that what governments and other institutions in the Caribbean appear to regard as a food security emergency is less hunger-related and more an analysis of certain prevailing factors including the climate change threat and the persistence of a high dependence on extra-regional food imports.
So, while the cultivation of greater volumes of nutritious foods and the creation of a distribution system that ensures there is sufficient to go around the region are important, the various other substantive challenges, including climate change, cannot be excluded from a blueprint that purports to speak seriously to a food security agenda.
Put differently it is, to a much lesser extent, the immediacy of the actual food security situation that gives the Caribbean something to think about. Much of the substantive concern reposes in the fact that the regional commitment to embracing solutions to this issue, that include the replacement of food imports with a well-thought-out region-wide agenda for food security through a home-grown strategy with an across-the-board embracing of agriculture, has always been and continues to be seriously lacking.
As this newspaper has posited before, unless the 25×2025 food import reduction plan is collectively embraced and scrupulously executed across the region it will quickly become a victim of the customary neglect which has subsumed other plans conceived at the regional level. Part of the problem is that the recent report regarding a serious global food security deficit, that sense of acute, life-and-death crisis in the world’s hunger zones, does not exist in this region. It is this, one feels, that mostly accounts for the woeful lethargy that has for years attended the largely empty food security discourses in the Caribbean. These discourses, truth be told, have always lacked the intensity that attend deliberations in the world’s hunger zones, and, markedly, once they have come and gone the commitments that emerged from the discussions are usually quietly set aside.
It certainly does not appear at this time that the Caribbean is hooked into any acute food insecurity phobia. Whether we should be or not is an entirely different matter. All of the attendant devastating consequences in other regions of the world, which manifest in spectacular attention getting, do not obtain in this part of the world. Certainly, the discourses and the various other food security-related undertakings in the Caribbean are usually not pursued with anywhere near the urgency as they do in the world’s worst hunger zones.
The varying degrees of diligence that attend the global food crisis from country to country and from region to region inform the gravity with which the matter is treated in various parts of the world. It is the same in the Caribbean. If one wants to be honest, it has to be said that insofar as Guyana, for example, faces anything resembling a food security crisis, that has to do to a far greater extent with rising food prices than with not having sufficient food to go around. Never mind the official protestations to the contrary, evidence suggests that the dietary regimes among inhabitants of some of the remote regions of Guyana do not conform to the globally accepted standard by which food security is measured.
Looking ahead, the rhetoric and the undertakings still remain the most prominent features of the Caribbean’s food security drive. Fresh commitments have arisen out of the recent surge of high-profile undertakings (like the 25 by 2025 mission) even though the region has become sufficiently wise, based on precedent, to cause it to wait for real steps to be taken before it gets its hopes up too high.
