Nadaleen Singh

The Caribbean has achieved ten per cent food se­cu­ri­ty and self-suf­fi­cien­cy, ac­cord­ing to Ar­ling­ton Ches­ney, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Caribbean Agri­cul­tur­al Re­search and De­vel­op­ment In­sti­tute (Car­di). The tar­get for the re­gion is 25 per cent, he told the T&T Guardian.Speak­ing in an in­ter­view af­ter the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of a re­gion­al work­shop at the Carl­ton Sa­van­nah, St Ann's, Ches­ney said the re­gion is im­port­ing too much food."We are strate­gi­cal­ly try­ing to iden­ti­fy those com­modi­ties that we can do away with eas­i­ly. We've iden­ti­fied about 12 com­modi­ties where the re­gion can make a rel­a­tive­ly rapid im­pact on the food im­port bill," he said.

Ches­ney said Car­di is look­ing at com­modi­ties to re­duce im­ports but there are chal­lenges in achiev­ing that goal."One of the chal­lenges that we have is that a lot of the food im­port is processed prod­ucts," he said, al­though he ex­pressed con­fi­dence that Cari­com is do­ing its part in pro­mot­ing the idea of food se­cu­ri­ty to the mem­ber states."In the last two or three years they have put a lot of the poli­cies in place. In one in­stance, I un­der­stand, there are three in­vestors from T&T in Guyana. Re­mem­ber Cari­com is not a 'do­ing' in­sti­tu­tion, the ac­tiv­i­ties (in­vest­ment) has to take place at the na­tion­al lev­el. What Cari­com has to do is try to fa­cil­i­tate those ac­tiv­i­ties at the na­tion­al lev­el along with the mem­ber States," he said.

Ches­ney said not all the food on the im­port bill can be elim­i­nat­ed but items such as poul­try, roots and tu­bers, fruits and veg­eta­bles, sheep and goat can be elim­i­nat­ed to achieve an ac­cept­able lev­el of food se­cu­ri­ty. Asked whether there was enough po­lit­i­cal will by the lead­ers of the Cari­com mem­ber states, he said there is need for a greater per­cent­age of na­tion­al bud­gets to be al­lo­cat­ed to agri­cul­tures.Ches­ney said Car­di plans to pi­lot a project on co­conuts in 2015.