Guyana’s President Dr Irfaan Ali on Friday has urged the Caribbean Community to move away from consuming poor-quality imported food and eat food grown in CARICOM.
Nine months into the presidency of the vast, resource-rich CARICOM state in South America, the 41-year-old sought to reassert Guyana’s long-held identity “breadbasket of the Caribbean”. He invoked the name of a past president’s pro-farming policy as he urged the 15-nation bloc to eat more of what it grows, slash its $9 billion (US$4.5 billion) food import bill and improve health and nutrition.
He told the Regional Food Systems Dialogue, a precursor to the United Nations 2021 Food Systems Summit scheduled for September, that it is time that Caribbean people remind themselves of the importance of eating locally and regionally grown food.
“We cannot continue to eat third quality or second quality when we can produce first quality, the Guyanese leader declared. “We have to be brave in addressing these issues. We can’t walk along the sidelines anymore.”
The Guyana-based CARICOM Secretariat has partnered with key UN and regional agencies including the United Nations Resident Coordinators, the Food and Agriculture Organization FAO, the World Food Programme (WFP), and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) to host the virtual event.
Farmers, policymakers, non-governmental organizations, businesses, and civil society participated in the forum with CARICOM agriculture ministers chairing the three sessions on climate change, Caribbean food systems, finance and funding for new Caribbean food systems and food production and security as a Caribbean imperative.
Ideas, solutions, and action plans emanating from this dialogue will feed into the Global forum that is part of the Decade of Action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, the CARICOM Secretariat said.
President Ali, who has lead responsibility for agriculture in the CARICOM quasi-cabinet, said that while efforts can be taken within the region to tackle food security, the CARICOM needs the help of external agencies especially in light of its vulnerability to climate change.
“The Caribbean region has been named as the second most hazard-prone region in the world, largely owing to its vulnerability and exposure to multiple extreme and frequent hazard events,” President Ali said, adding, “it is therefore imperative that attention is given to building climate resilience in order to transform the region’s agri-food systems”.
He said progress towards achieving the SDGs requires a commitment from all member states for affirmative action with respect to climate change.
President Ali recalled the Jagdeo initiative, named for his People’s Progressive Party predecessor, Bharrat Jagdeo. In 2007, Jagdeo proposed a strategy for removing constraints to farming development in the Caribbean. It builds upon past regional efforts to develop a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and identifies ten key binding constraints faced by agriculture.
“Foremost among those constraints was limited financing and new investments in the sector,” said the Guyanese president. “The initiative proposed the development of a fund to modernise regional agriculture. But financing for regional agriculture cannot be divorced from financing for climate resilience.”
He said the success of the regional effort in agriculture will depend on the degree of international support, especially with respect to financing in building more resilient agriculture.
“Financing for sustainable development is of equal importance,” he said, recalling an intervention he made at a UN high-level conference earlier this week on the extractive industries.
“I said then that without greater access to financing efforts by small states to meet their commitments under the Paris Agreement …will be derailed”.
He urged regional countries to seize the opportunities of the September UN food systems summit to link greater resilience with increased access to financing sustainable development.
Ali said that the Caribbean must add its voice to the full implementation of the Addis Abba Action Agenda for a third international conference on financing for development. He said there was also a need for a greater base of financing for the establishment of a climate change vulnerability fund.
Earlier, Prime Minister Mia Mottley, the lead head of government on the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME), told the conference that she hopes the region accepts the fact “that we need to expedite the process of producing as much food regionally as we can see and that we need to come together, accepting that the true breadbaskets of the region will be Guyana, Suriname and Belize”.
“But that does not remove from the rest of us the obligation of producing as much food as we can,” she said, acknowledging that while there are some difficulties, they should be confronted.
She said: “The first and foremost is the potential normal access for cheaper food from outside of the region, and therefore the question as to how we treat to the whole issue of food security, allowing us to anchor our domestic policies and our trade policies becomes absolutely critical.”
Mottley said also that the region “cannot afford to only have the need to grow food when there is a crisis”.
She continued: “Our farmers need certainty to be able to produce food year-round. It means that there will be some need for some level of protection because they simply cannot withstand the onslaught of cheaper prices from outside where they have the benefit of scale.
“Unless we confront this frontally, we will put at risk our own national security and the well being of our citizens. The bottom line is our farmers can only produce consistently if they are given the platform and the environment within which to do so.”
The Prime Minister suggested another problem is that there are too few people schooled in the rudiments of good farming and agricultural practices.
“We do not have a strong enough research agenda and it is incomprehensible for me how that can be the case when as far back as the 19th century, my own country led the world with respect to research in cane…as we exploited the reality of cane agriculture as it was then,” she said.
Mottley said there was also a need to infuse technology into Caribbean agriculture, saying “we use cell phones now…in order to be able to communicate to do work to do all kinds of things and the ability to use technology whether in the form of drone technology or other forms of technology… while at the same time not impairing the quality of food that is produced is absolutely essential”.
But she acknowledged that as technology is expensive, it is critical that the region “coordinate to be able to secure the best prices wherever possible and not only within our region should that collaboration take place”, (CMC/BT)