Prior to the staging of the event, the Stabroek News’ previous editorials on the preparations for the Caribbean Week of Agriculture forum held in The Bahamas from October 9-13 took the position that if the manner in which the forum was being advertised was anything to go by, we should not expect that the actual proceedings would focus on the food security-related challenges facing the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).
We felt that there was an aura of glitz to the pre-forum marketing of the event that seemed to be doing more to advertise the fact that the event was being held in ‘touristy’ The Bahamas and that it did not do nearly enough to put the forum up front and to place it in the context of the food security challenges facing the region.
Certainly, the marketing of the forum failed to sufficiently underscore the fact that the event was being staged against the backdrop of the earlier revelation by the United Nations World Food Programme that the number of people estimated to be facing moderate to severe levels of food insecurity in the English-speaking Caribbean has risen by 46 percent over the previous six months. The report had stated, specifically, that nearly 4.1 million people or 57 percent of the Caribbean’s population was facing a condition of food insecurity and that the food security challenge was much more acute in those Caribbean territories that were more dependent on extra-regional food imports. These considerations should have been placed ahead of everything in the marketing of the forum.
Here, we noted that while the region, led by Guyana and Barbados had moved to undertake some initiatives designed to seek to roll back the food security threat (the 25×2025 food imports reduction target and the launch of a regional Food Security Terminal being foremost among them) there appeared to be little if any effort in the marketing of the Bahamas forum to make the connection. There had been no reminder of those warnings in the glitzy’ promotion of the Bahamas event.
It was the starkness of the declarations regarding the region’s food security crisis that had triggered the sense of urgency among CARICOM governments, in the first place and it was this, as well, that had given rise to the region’s commitment to the realization of a 25% reduction in extra regional food imports by 2025. All that said, notably missing from the marketing of the Nassau forum was the context of urgency (emergency?) in which it ought to have been set.
Truth be told the Caribbean has an unenviable reputation for immersing itself in high-sounding and sometimes decidedly distracting sloganeering in much of what it undertakes, though the available evidence suggests that at the end of the day the sloganeering doesn’t really count for much. So that while, for example, one is not unmindful of the magnitude of the assignment associated with the completion of the promised regional Food Security Terminal it does no harm to point, as this newspaper has done repeatedly, to the importance of updating the people of the region on the pace of progress towards the completion of this assignment. The time for an update on this project, in our view, has long come and gone.
Contextually, one might mention, as well, the region’s 25×2025 target for the reduction of extra-regional food imports and to allude to the fact that as much as there is no harm in ‘talking up’ that timeline, the noise in the market (as we say in the Caribbean) is not the sale. If we are to realize the 25×2025 target we are going to have to tie that target to the acceleration of food production in the region to compensate for the envisaged reduction in imports.
Here, one feels that there ought to be some kind of link between the 25×2025 target and aggressive movement towards the completion of the Regional Food Terminal since it is from the Terminal, one assumes, that supplies will have to come to compensate for some of the reduction (by 25%) of food imports.
To return to the issue of The Bahamas forum it is entirely reasonable to inquire, in the circumstances, into the outcomes of the forum. Here, one felt no sense of strong linkage between The Bahamas forum and the food security challenge facing the region. While, for example, this newspaper had suggested that the Forum might have been a suitable place to provide a meaningful progress on the Terminal project, no such report (as far as we are aware) was made on what is, arguably, the more important intra-regional food security undertaking in the regional pipeline.
In her address, CARICOM Secretary General Dr. Carla Barnett made reference to the “unique opportunity” which The Bahamas forum afforded to have the region “collaborate, (and) share knowledge and best practices that will contribute to the advancement of agriculture in our region.” If there is any evidence that the forum did a great deal to embrace the Secretary General’s proposal there is no evidence, it remains a closely guarded secret.
Up to this time there is no evidence that what ought to have been, contextually, one of the more important regional gatherings this year has delivered a publicly available report on the focus and specific outcomes of the forum. Except that is forthcoming then queries will hang over the issue as to why we even bothered to stage the event, in the first place.
