Global discourse on the subject of food security has been accentuated by the advent of COVID-19 and what the world’s foremost international organizations say are the possible implications of the effects of the virus for both hunger and malnutrition across the world in the future. Unsurprisingly, the United Nations (UN), has weighed in prominently on this issue. Going forward it does not rule out the likelihood that global food security might become one of the most affected victims of the virus.
The Caribbean is at the centre of the global food security discourse, its current annual US$5 billion food import bill along with its continued and heavy dependence on (often nutritionally questionable) food imports to cater largely for tourist arrivals, places it among the food-dependent regions of the world. Guyana, traditionally, has not been grouped with the rest of the Caribbean in that regard, blessed as we are with an agricultural sector that is second to none in the region, Whether the bounty of our agricultural sector is sufficient to place us in the category of food-secure countries is not an issue that appears to have been given nearly enough serious thought at some key levels of the Guyana society. Carried away, it seems, by the generous bounty of the country’s agricultural sector, public officials and the media alike frequently parade this as qualifying criteria for the conferral of food-secure status, overlooking various other key qualifying criteria which we manifestly do not meet.
Contrary to what often appears to be popular belief, the concept of food-security is bound by a clear definition and criteria that bear no exclusive relationship to the volumes of food produced by or available in the country in question. The UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) asserts that food security exists only where “all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” That, pure and simple, is manifestly not the case in Guyana.
The FAO goes further, itemizing four specific criteria for food security, namely, food availability, food access, food utilization and food stability. One need look no further than the challenges associated with making adequate volumes of sufficiently nutritious foods available across our hinterland communities, an area in which we are nowhere close to succeeding, to determine that in at least one critical respect Guyana falls decidedly short of a globally accepted qualifying rationale for being considered food secure.
But that is not all. Setting aside the definitions set out by various other international organizations, (and there are few more than are similar in intent to the FAO’s) our own Food Security Strategy Paper declares unequivocally that “food security is not limited to the availability of food, but also includes access to food and quality of nutrition.” The food security challenge,” it continues, “involves creating income-earning opportunities and making enough safe and nutritious food available for all residents,” issues which rarely ever surface in local food security discourses.
The customary shallowness of the food security discourse in Guyana is really no small matter in circumstances where, once we set aside our delusions of food security grandeur we are left with notions and fallacies that can cause real food security to continue to elude us. Global discourses on food security and hunger always invariably address critical related issues including, considerations that have to do with investment in agriculture, investment in infrastructure associated with moving food to food-deficient communities, targeted agriculture that focuses on vulnerable communities, adequate food and nutrition ‘cover’ in vulnerable areas and in Guyana’s particular case, accelerated investment in transport, farming and agro-processing and the creation of markets for hinterland farm produce.
There are other considerations too. Credible definitions of food security must also include considerations of food safety as it relates to restaurants as well as what we in Guyana loosely term “road food.” In this regard perspectives on how food secure we are cannot be separated from what, these days, are the frequent soundings of the Government Analyst-Food & Drugs Department (GA-FDD) on the risks associated with consuming street-vended foods.
For far too long public officials, the media and all too often significant sections of the populace have been inclined to fashion an entirely fallacious nexus between the volumes of food yielded by an agricultural sector that deserves full credit for its consistent performance over the years and what they regard as food security. In anchoring ourselves – particularly at the levels of officialdom and the media – to this fallacy we run the risk of having real food security and the developmental benefits that attend that condition elude us on account of our neglect of the things we must do to get there.
