With due respect to what, these days, appears to be a preference in the Caribbean for endless ‘sit downs’ on the issue of regional food security, the point where the outcomes of these fora goes nowhere has long been reached. Granted, some of our politicians are well-schooled in stirring (rhetorical) speeches and some of the bureaucrats who ‘make up’ delegations to these fora have become practiced in putting together ‘final communiques’ the language of which is ultra-sensitive to the media’s high-dependency on sound bite. The current political ‘cheerleaders’ on regional food security are President Irfaan Ali of Guyana and Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados. Time was when then President (now Vice President) Bharrat Jagdeo filled one of the cheerleading slots.
The most recent ‘noises’ in the region about regional food security coincide roughly with pronouncements by the UN that caught the attention of the region as a whole though it seemed that it had never before occurred to us, as a collective, that significant swathes of people in the English-speaking Caribbean were either not getting sufficient to eat, or, that their food intake only took marginal account of their nutritional bona fides. Themes like 25×2025 and the Regional Food Security Terminal appeared to be the two key pillars on which, going forward, regional food security would be built.
It was the UN’s dismissal of our not too bad food security bona fides that triggered the noises about the importance of ‘changing gears’ with due haste. Here, it has to be said, that up to this time the response is reflected more in elaborate gestures like intra-regional meetings that essentially “recommit” to regional food security than in any concrete action. One of the initiatives in which a certain degree of optimism appeared to have been invested is the proposed Regional Food Security Terminal, a sort of emergency ‘feeding station’ for countries in the region that are likely to be the hardest hit by food scarcity. While no one expected that such an undertaking would have been realized overnight, one would have nevertheless expected this initiative to yield immediate results, given what are known to be the challenges and failure to provide routine progress updates cannot be excused. This is an ‘open and shut’ expectation of a project that appeared to have been conceptualized as an important ‘fall back’ position if push came to shove for the less food security-credentialed countries of the region.
One fails to see why, whatever the extant status of the Terminal may be, those ‘experts’ from across the region, who are closest to the project, cannot provide Heads of Government with updates on just where the project stands at this time and what sort of timeline has been projected for the completion of its undertaking. This deficiency is unacceptable. Here the point should be made that the food security bona fides in the various CARICOM territories vary, in some instances, significantly, from country to country. While Guyana, for example, is some considerable distance away from being substantively food insecure, the same cannot be said for some of the smaller CARICOM countries that are considerably dependent on extra-regional food imports.
However we ‘slice it,’ Guyana, as the ‘lead’ CARICOM member state where matters of food security is concerned, has been intimately associated with other initiatives, failed ones, it has to be said, that had to do with regional food security; the truth here, however is not to necessarily cancel out its credentials to continue to lead the regional food security charge. Truth be told, the available evidence on the matter of the various initiatives undertaken by the region in seeking to put ourselves ‘on track’ for moving closer to a condition of food security suggests that we have failed to grasp the significance of the saying that ‘the noise in the market is not the sale’. One gets the impression that the sense of ‘theatre’ associated with stirring speeches dripping with hyperbole has become one of the trademarks of these ‘food security gatherings.’
Contextually, we must wait to see whether the 2023 October 9-13 Caribbean Agriculture forum scheduled to be staged in The Bahamas yields anything beyond a stirring communique. The problem where the Caribbean Week of Agriculture is concerned is that failure to deliver much beyond stirring ‘performances from the podium’ and ‘decoratively worded communiques’ would be a clear signal that we are still sitting on our hands on the matter of regional food security. Once the rhetoric that emerges from the endless ‘sit downs’ fails to be attended by practical action, and this, in the instance of the Caribbean’s approach to addressing its food security challenges, has, up until now, been overwhelmingly the case, then it is time that we begin to consider re-directing the monies spent on these regional ‘sit downs’ on poverty alleviation, another regional challenge that is painfully evident across the region.
