THE week before the May 19-21, 2022 Agricultural Investment Forum and Exposition in Guyana saw the world already reeling severely under the increasing World Food and Fuel prices, due to the combined effect of the Ukraine War and earlier global Climate Change and other factors.

MAY 17: UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders reported there were 40 million severely-malnourished children globally under five years old today, the number having risen, thanks to the Ukraine War, but always continuously increasing annually.

MAY 18: While mothers of the 40 million malnourished children in the world’s poorest nations were themselves under-fed and unable to better nourish their children, producers of infant formula in Europe joined, almost overnight, to produce and rush emergency supplies of millions of milk packages to the USA, where prices had skyrocketed just before supermarket shelves ran out.

MAY 18: On the day before the Forum started, the UK inflation rate also reached a record 40-year high of nine per cent, as energy bills soared for all households, hitting the poorest harder, but increasingly affecting the middle class, with food charities reporting more people, including officially-admitted Ukrainian refugee families, turning up at public food distribution outlets, many also requesting meals they could eat cold, because they couldn’t afford the increased energy costs.

MAY 19: The CARICOM-backed Forum launched with representation by leaders from Antigua & Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Trinidad & Tobago and Montserrat. Citing the new and frightening global realities, CARICOM Chairman and Belize Prime Minister John Brisceno noted that: “Agriculture represents a clear opportunity for increased investment in agricultural production and agro-processing…” and “It is, therefore, imperative that action is taken to maximize the benefits of present opportunities.” Despite the current global challenges, Brisceno said, there are “abundant opportunities” in Agriculture “that can result in enhancing our goal to ensure regional food security, as well as increasing economic activity”. CARICOM, the Chairman advised, “must now do better to remove those technical barriers for trade that most of us impose on each other”. Instead, he advocated, CARICOM member-states should “use our efforts and energies to adopt policies to support the growth of the agro-productive sector, improve market facilitation and develop intra-regional transportation”.

Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, a self-described “proud and self-sufficient farmer”, also highlighted the self-defeating policies adopted by some member-states imposing restrictions on imports of produce from fellow member-states, making Dominica unable to export avocadoes and ginger to neighbouring Caribbean nations, but freely to Europe and US markets.

Host President Dr. Irfaan Ali announced a series of targets aimed at reducing Guyana’s own US$30 million annual food import bill, in keeping with the regional aim to reduce food imports by 25 per cent by 2025. He said Guyana had entered into “partnership and collaboration” with “private sector building consortia, farmers and young people in the production of high-value crops, corn and soya, and a special project with young people for shrimp farming.”

President Ali also announced investments in, and allocations by way of: G$100 million for production of brackish water shrimp, which had seen production growth from 250,000 kilograms in 2021 to 1.2 million kilograms this year, and another G$150 million will be invested to boost production by more than 50 per cent. Additionally, G$200 million for development of a growth farm for Pacific White Leg Shrimp; G$40 million to research and develop breed programmes for indigenous, commercially-viable freshwater species; and more investments in Wheat Production to satisfy local and eventually regional needs.

Guyana’s plans for up to 2025 include: Increasing poultry, corn and soya production, as well as vegetable and rice production; as well as investing in marine- cage technology in the riverine areas, boosting sheep production with 1,000 Black Belly Sheep from Barbados to be raised in Guyana, and returned as mutton to the Caribbean island, and Barbados will also benefit from sending youth to study shrimp production.

MAY 20: While the Forum discussed agenda items on the second day, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) announced Ukraine’s poverty rate was up by 87 per cent since the war started, and can reach 90 per cent by the end of 2022. And The World Food Programme (WFP) also estimated earlier that about 49 million people face emergency levels of hunger; about 811 million go to bed hungry each night; and the number of people on the brink of starvation across Africa’s Sahel Region, for example, is at least 10 times higher than in pre-COVID 2019.

MAY 21: The Forum ended with valuable and achievable proclamations and declarations of intent, local and regional leaders and delegations returning home at the end of three days of coming to full grips with the issues at hand to be tackled to ensure the region can achieve its 2025 aims, and for nations to brace themselves from today for the existing challenges that will grow heavier by the day.

In the ten days after the end of the forum, the global food security system became even more insecure, but stakeholders everywhere also offered innovative and science-based solutions, alongside irreplaceable traditional approaches, including radical changes to produce more on less land, with less hands, and to feed more mouths with better food.

For example:
MAY 28: Saint Lucia’s Agriculture Minister Alfred Prospere, embracing the regional aim to reduce food imports by 25 by 2025 advised that: “Home and School Gardening” can help regional households and families overcome any need to import products grown locally, like the ‘Seven Crops’ programme being undertaken to increase production and availability of specific crops boosting body immunity, with a similar ‘Nine Crops’ programme also being undertaken in St. Vincent & the Grenadines.

MAY 30: E&E Agrochemicals, a Saint Lucian biotech fertiliser firm, launched its three main products on the Grenada market: One that “helps plants grow food and flowers”, another that “helps plants make food” and a third that “helps plants absorb nutrients from the soil”.

MAY 31: Charities across the UK called on the Government to do and spend more to feed millions more children in British schools affected by parents being unable to afford three meals a day, and, therefore, depending on school food supplements, due to rising fuel and food prices.

MAY 31: Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa said his government may be ready to take control of formerly white-owned farms from local farmers he accused of under-utilising them, and hand them over to Zimbabweans living in the diaspora, including in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who had shown interest in acquiring farming and residential land back home.

JUNE 1: The global food crisis is also increasingly forcing Caribbean consumers to more quickly alter minds and taste buds towards better foods traditionally grown and always available locally, from cassava and ginger to rice and bananas.

It’s clear the region’s leaders need no more convincing that the time is ‘Now or Never’ to ensure they walk the talk, minute-by-minute and mile-by-mile, today and tomorrow, to turn the missteps of yesteryear into a full and final forward march into a sustainable and secure future for Caribbean Food for Caribbean People, throughout what’s left of the Ukraine war, and way beyond…

But it all has to start HERE and NOW!