By Orin Gordon

AT the opening of the summit of the Caribbean Community and Common Market in Georgetown on Sunday, one theme emerged more consistently and strongly than others. “Food and nutrition security”, as CARICOM Secretary-General, Dr Carla Barnett and current chairman and host, Dr Irfaan Ali of Guyana, described it.

We’ve heard a lot about food security over the years. Nutrition is being conspicuously coupled with it at CARICOM’s 46th Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government, to give the meeting its full title. Good, but the leaders need to go further. We’ll get to that shortly.

CARICOM is more adept at lofty expression than breaking things down for Jean Public, especially when communicating the business and the outcomes of their summits. So what does food and nutrition security mean?

A good place to start is CARICOM’s website – a resource into which they’ve put much work in recent years, and which is now rather good. Three months ago, the CARICOM Secretariat posted a promotional video – Vision 25 by 2025 – announcing the aim of reducing the region’s food-import bill by 25 per cent by 2025.

The drivers of the plan are a ministerial task force on food production and food security and the CARICOM Private Sector Organisation (CPSO), and is supported by the CARICOM Secretariat, the promo says.

It goes on to say that the plan involves the removal of trade barriers. This is a big obstacle to keeping down the cost of moving food between CARICOM countries. As is the case with moving people between latitudinal adjacent islands, Haiti and mainland Guyana and Belize, it’s often easier, faster and cheaper to take the longer route through Miami. Air transport – even for hops of under 30 minutes – can be brutally expensive. For people and goods.

The logic behind the proposed ferry service that would link Trinidad, Guyana and nearby islands of the south/central Caribbean seems to be moving not just people, but goods.

If the goods include fresh-grown food (and whether they’re moved by sea or air) the CARICOM teams running 25 by 2025 would have to look at expanding the shelf life of the produce. This is where agro-processing comes in. Some of the stuff would have to be tinned and packaged, especially the quickly perishable.

New transportation insurance arrangements would have to accompany any increase in transportation of agricultural goods. That would mean seeking co-operation and better deals from insurance companies… local, multinational and foreign.

If the 25 by 2025 team made all of this work as planned, they’d still have to reckon with customs and taxes that remain mostly, stubbornly individualised despite CARICOM’s well-meaning rhetoric about removing trade barriers. It’s rhetoric we’ve been hearing for the better part of the 50 years of its existence.

The removal of trade barriers, like the unrestricted movement of labour, is one of the things about CARICOM that cause us to tune out and roll our eyes. The inability of generations of leaders to ease and simplify inter-island customs red tape has been a frustrating failure. And now that 25 by 2025 aims at moving goods much more cheaply and quickly, the problem is plain to see. In too many shops and supermarkets the US imported food is cheaper than regionally and even locally produced food that it sits alongside on the shelf.

A target of 25 per cent seems modest and achievable, but a lot of things are going to have to line up to realise even a smaller reduction in the region’s food-import bill. In the meantime, we’re going to need more details.

What is the exact size of the food bill, in multiples of millions of US dollars? How does it break down, country by country? How does it compare to the big one – petroleum products importation? Show us, by actual examples, how proposed changes in insurance and shipping are going to reduce the cost of moving a unit of corn between Guyana and Barbados. Tell us what would have to be processed from raw, and where you’re setting up the processing factories.

It is a heavier lift than it sounds. So, you’d need to bring us, the citizens, along every step of the way. We can handle the details and minutiae. And we want to make it easier for you. We’d likely see the benefit in our grocery bills, but it’s much more than about financial cost savings. It’s also about health cost savings.

As we get more information about food and its effect on our health and wellbeing, we’ve been attaching greater importance to eating better. Diabetes, heart diseases and hypertension are increasing in our countries. Our bad diets are also feeding the growth of certain cancers. The cost of food is far more than a dollars and cents consideration.

Ultimately, 25 by 2025 is going to have to step beyond its current mission and bring in the region’s ministers of health as partners and planners. And if nutrition is in the mix, exercise and recreation would have to be. All are joined up with food. President Ali, in a bullish address on Sunday, talked of bringing in Usain Bolt, Chris Gayle and Clive Lloyd as ambassadors “to raise resources and revenue.” CARICOM would be missing an opportunity if it didn’t include another R, which is within the core competence of these great athletes. Recreation.

The meeting ends today. We’ll talk more about the other big issues next week.

The author is a media consultant. More at oringordon.com