The warnings that the Caribbean continues to receive regarding the likelihood that climate change and some of its consequences, not least radically changing weather patterns, would bring an increasingly greater level of threat to regional food security are justifying themselves through weather patterns that grow more vicious in their intensity. Some of the earliest signs of the impact of the seasonal weather on agriculture in the region have come from Trinidad and Tobago where farmers have reportedly been ‘throwing tantrums’ over the impact of the rains on their pursuits and in some instances simply abandoning their farms until the weather gets better. Some of the same kinds of concern are beginning to manifest in the farming sector elsewhere in the region.
All of this, the Stabroek Business has already reminded, is taking place against the earlier backdrop of complaints from some of the smaller island states in the region about food security threats, not all of them necessarily connected to the prevailing inclement weather, but each, in their own way, impacting, to various degrees on food security at the level of families. We now know, unmistakably, that the seasonal rains have come in Guyana, those downpours that sweep away structures, ravage crops and livestock and require remedial state intervention which, all too frequently, takes time to arrive and even when it does is often inadequate to stave off the worst excesses of the flooding. Here, it should be noted that this time around the floods that affect both the island nations of the region as well as Guyana, one of the two leading regional players (the other being Barbados) in the pursuit of the creation of the planned regional food terminal, could be sufficiently severe to significantly set back the timetable for getting the regional food security terminal up and running.
Accordingly, the suitable response from the two lead players in the food terminal project and the mechanism of CARICOM ought to be to begin to seek ways that should not exclude the involvement of regional institutions like the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and the Inter-American Development Bank to help address what ought not to have been an altogether unexpected development. One makes this point mindful of the fact that, arguably, more than ever before, the region has come under pressure to shore up its food security bona fides. This is bearing in mind what now appears to be unmistakable indications that the weaknesses in our ability to feed ourselves, as manifested in the openly admitted food security travails by a clutch of smaller CARICOM territories, have given rise to the dire necessity for Guyana to step up to the plate.
The current circumstances, not least the aforementioned immediate-term barriers that appear to stand in the way of the realization of regional food security at this time, altogether justifies raising the issue as to just how far out of the blocks we are to frontally address the 25×2025 target for cutting back on extra-regional food imports, given that it is just a few months shy of a year since the idea was first placed in the public domain. If the earlier ‘window’ that might have been afforded previous Caribbean Heads of Government of a decade and more ago time at arriving at the goal of regional security, that window is now far less open given the accelerated encroachment of climate change in recent years. Put differently, options that had been available back then are no longer there. Time, most assuredly, is not on our side.
The 25×2025 undertaking, for example, should itself benefit from a structure that is overseen by a group of regional experts, suitably committed, suitably charged and suitably empowered to function not just within the framework of a pre-determined timetable but also within pre-determined periodic timelines that allow for timely updates. They should, as well, be empowered with strategic access to regional Heads of Government in order not to just position them to expedite their assignments but also free of intervening ‘red tape’ and also to ensure that the food security mission not be hindered by the notorious bureaucratic blockages for which CARICOM member states have something of a track record. As has already been said, the evidence that is located in the patent manifestations of a fast-worsening circumstance of global climate change can no longer be denied.
