About a week ago, sections of the regional media delivered news that the Assistant Director General and Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), had addressed the opening function of the “High-Level Agricultural Ministerial Meeting” held in Kingston, Jamaica on September 18. The announcement came against what had already been a stack of regional high-level gatherings that had occurred this year alone to probe the state of health of the region’s food security bona fides in the light of the less than stellar reports that had been ‘turned in’ recently on the issue. It need hardly be said that our overall report card on the subject of food security is, up to this time, nothing to write home about. We were told that some of the smaller territories of the region are now seriously food security-challenged, reliant as they already are on extra-regional food imports and whilst the 25×2025 regional extra regional food import reduction target would appear to be at the top of the current agenda for enhancing the region’s food security agenda, we need a good deal more solid evidence that the region is on track to realize that goal. It’s hard to determine what, at this stage, is to be made of the planned Regional Food Security Terminal. The whole idea behind the Terminal, as we understand it, is to have it serve as a kind of ‘stop gap’ in the event that any CARICOM member country becomes seriously food insecure insofar as we already know that many of them are. If it was never felt that the Terminal would have been an overnight job, there cannot, in this newspaper’s opinion, be any good reason why given what we know to be the overarching regional importance of the project, we cannot be ‘briefed’ periodically on the matter of just how far away we are from having it up and running.
