Are Barbados and the region still challengedby food security issues?
It is no secret that Barbados imports the majority of the food it consumes. Eating habits here have changed over the years, and the exposure to a large amount of foreign items means that the youngest generation of Barbadians – are for the most part – no longer consuming the ground provisions, vegetables and other crops their foreparents did years before.
This has several implications, including allocation of national budgets and the use of foreign exchange to buy food from foreign producers, the danger that Barbados – especially the younger ones with so-called fast food tastes will not get the required nutrition, the negative impact such foreign foods have on the health of the population, contributing to chronic non-communicable diseases, and an over-reliance on imported items that leaves the country vulnerable if there is ever an international shortage, commodity price increase or conflict that prevents shipping.
These and other considerations will continue to challenge Barbados for as long as it depends on the international community for key foods such as wheat, corn, and rice. An important question is what can be done, and what has been done, to ensure that Barbados and the wider region attain what is commonly called food security and, by extension, nutrition security.
The issue is one which continues to generate debate in Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean. In Barbados’ case, five months ago Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture Esworth Reid said Barbados’ food security was under threat, and that the agriculture sector was at the point of crisis.
Speaking at the official launch of the Youth Agri-preneurship Incubator Programme, which sought to attract young people to the sector, Reid said a problem confronting authorities was the fact that the majority of the farming community in Barbados and the Caribbean was over the age of 60.
He warned: “If a concerted and serious effort is not made to replenish this creative segment of the farming community, our agriculture sector and our food security in the very near future will be seriously compromised.
“Other than just focusing on sand and sea we need to use our human resource and our land to research, to develop and grow. It however, needs the kind of unwavering support of our political leaders and those in decision-making positions in the private sector where most of the financial resource is, to make things happen,” he said.
Commenting on the issue, Barbados Agricultural Society chief executive officer James Paul said, “What we need to see is a more bottom-up approach to the management of the industry where those people who actually manage agriculture businesses are listened to more.”
But what is Government actually doing about food security? Minister of Agriculture Dr David Estwick, speaking at the recent launch of his ministry’s food and nutrition media campaign, said Barbados was focusing on developing and implementing a food and nutrition security policy and action plan, based largely on a similar effort developed by CARICOM five years ago.
The Barbados plan’s aim was to “achieve the optimum degree of self reliance that contributes to food and nutrition security”. In this regard, it would “use a strategy that aims to maximise domestic food production, utilising indigenous raw materials and domestic human and natural resources, and ensure that all households have sufficient resources and knowledge at all times to access adequate, safe, affordable and nutritious foods”.
“In order to achieve a satisfactory level of food security, we must be prepared to find new ways of doing old things, to improve on the skills and creativity of our forefathers through research, innovation and new technologies. This would go a long way in addressing the changes and challenges we encounter, such as climate change, declining food production, increased dependence on food imports, increased cost of local production, declining competitiveness of local agricultural products and increased use of unhealthy foods,” Estwick said.
On the regional front, information showed that Barbados, Guyana, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname had all achieved the goal of halving the proportion of hungry people by 2015. The challenge for these islands and others is that their effort to grow more food, while importing less, and hence boosting their food securitiy, will continue to be the problem of changing climatic conditions, including increased drought, and other factors.
Solving this is critical, considering that the region imports $10 billion of the food it consumes annually.