In the weeks preceding the staging of the Caribbean Week of Agriculture [CWA] in October no pains were spared across the region to ‘big up’ the event, coverage of its agenda suggesting that it might well be one of those regional events that might play a pivotal role in helping to turn the proverbial corner in the matter of shoring up what we were being told for several months were our shabby food security bona fides. Media coverage preceding the event left the impression that everybody-who-was-anybody in the realms of agriculture and food security, particularly, would be there, that the deliberations would be intense and that they would be closely anchored to the concerns that had been floating around the region for a year or more, prior, about the Caribbean’s uninspiring food security bona fides.
There had even been some measure of hope expressed in some quarters that CARICOM Heads might use the occasion of the CWA event to release some kind of update on the Food Security Terminal even though persons with some knowledge of the pace of progress towards the completion of the Terminal were dismissing that notion as wishful thinking. These considerations apart, the Stabroek Business recalls that a generous measure of media coverage had been afforded on which officials from the various territories in the region would be travelling to the Bahamas and there had even been a generous measure of information disseminated on the Bahamas’ tourism resource, a perfectly understandable promotional initiative in the face of news that resorts could anticipate a wave of Caribbean people, who at some point in time, might want to get away from the confines of the Conference Hall and ‘throw back.’
