WE have been able to survive in a world rocked by successive economic crises and spiralling inflation and have been able to achieve a notable measure of success in our development efforts,only because we produce so much of our own food and are able to use our foreign exchange earnings mainly for buying goods for development rather than for buying food. The fact of the matter is that we should have banned the importation of some of these food items. We probably would have been able to afford them at prevailing world prices. We still import some food items, largely because of acquired tastes.
On the basis of nutritional values, there is absolutely no reason why we should still import these items. As oil prices continue to skyrocket, we have to give urgent consideration to the question of continuing the importation of these remaining items.
The time is fast approaching when we may have to elect between continuing to import the food items that we still cling to and surviving as a nation.
A country which depends for its food supply on external sources is in a vulnerable position. It is incapable of guaranteeing its citizens adequate or regular food supplies, and finds it difficult (if not impossible) to exercise an important option of social policy, i.e., regulating and managing food prices at  reasonable levels. To ensure that the people have an adequate, regular and varied supply of nutritious food is one of the main aims of a strong economy. Moreover, such a country is susceptible to serious political pressures from outside.
Notwithstanding the extensive news coverage given every day to the so-called world energy crisis, the most important crisis facing the world is that of the adequacy of food supplies. Hunger and malnutrition continue to be pressing problems in much of the developing world; the past decades have not seen any major progress, while the absolute number of people who are undernourished remains the same (about  one billion), and the proportion of the world’s population that has remained hungry has undergone a dramatic decline.
Apart from the self-sufficiency objective, our policy must be to expand food production for export. In the first place, current projections are that in the years ahead, food prices will rise more sharply than oil prices; the export of food may well be the means by which we will find it possible to meet our oil bills.Secondly, we have to give serious consideration to the question of regional food security. CARICOM countries import  billions of dollars of food from outside the Region every year.