Suzanne Shep­pard

With in­ter­na­tion­al food im­port bills ex­pect­ed to cross the tril­lion-dol­lar mark this year and the prices of most com­modi­ties up sharply from last year, many gov­ern­ments have put is­sues re­lat­ed to food and food se­cu­ri­ty back on the front burn­er. "Glob­al de­vel­op­ments would sug­gest that we should be work­ing to­wards feed­ing our­selves rather than leav­ing it to oth­ers to feed us," said Gregg CE Rawl­ins, In­ter-Amer­i­can In­sti­tute for Co­op­er­a­tion in Agri­cul­ture (IICA) Rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Trinidad and To­ba­go."There­fore, we must first pro­mote the pos­si­bil­i­ty that we can, to a large ex­tent feed our­selves...We have what it takes." Speak­ing at the launch of the IICA/CAR­DI Me­dia Awards for Ex­cel­lence in Agri­cul­tur­al Jour­nal­ism, Rawl­ins said it was time to tar­get de­vel­op­ment of key com­modi­ties which could go a long way in feed­ing our peo­ple.

He said it was im­por­tant to ex­plore pos­si­bil­i­ties for find­ing nov­el and cre­ative ways of sway­ing taste pref­er­ences to­ward whole­some, nu­tri­tious and tasty lo­cal­ly pro­duced foods, as well as adding val­ue, from ba­sic pack­ag­ing to prod­uct trans­for­ma­tion. Rawl­ins said it was al­so im­por­tant to look at the po­ten­tial for link­ing agri­cul­ture with in­dus­try, tourism, the en­vi­ron­ment and the health sec­tor. He said there were great pos­si­bil­i­ties in "treat­ing agri­cul­ture as an in­te­grat­ed sys­tem with the wider econ­o­my and not sole­ly as a farm­ing sec­tor." He said lo­cal agri­cul­ture could con­tribute pos­i­tive­ly to a low car­bon de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy and re­duc­ing this coun­try's car­bon foot­print; play a cen­tral role in nat­ur­al re­source man­age­ment; and lead the way in adopt­ing clean tech­nolo­gies and sus­tain­able pro­duc­tion sys­tems based on re­build­ing soils and ap­ply­ing nat­ur­al or or­gan­ic prin­ci­ples."There are al­so pos­si­bil­i­ties for Caribbean gov­ern­ments to pro­vide sus­tained and mean­ing­ful­ly sup­port to the agri-food sec­tor through the adop­tion of ap­pro­pri­ate pol­i­cy frame­works and in­sti­tu­tion­al arrange­ments at the na­tion­al and re­gion­al lev­els," Rawl­ins said.

"We need to sup­port the re­form, re­tool­ing and mod­erni­sa­tion of our in­sti­tu­tions–our re­search in­sti­tu­tions, our in­sti­tu­tions for high­er learn­ing, our fi­nanc­ing in­sti­tu­tions, our sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy in­sti­tu­tions, our farmer or­gan­i­sa­tions, our NGOs, our de­vel­op­ment part­ners to move from the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ties to the achieve­ment of re­sults on the ground." The IICA/CAR­DI awards are aimed at fos­ter­ing a greater un­der­stand­ing of food se­cu­ri­ty and re­lat­ed is­sues, en­cour­age more in­formed re­port­ing on agri­cul­ture and in­crease in­ter­ac­tion and cre­ate new part­ner­ships be­tween the agri­cul­ture sec­tor and the me­dia.The awards pe­ri­od is March 1, 2010, to March 31, 2011, and the com­pe­ti­tion is open to full-time and free­lance jour­nal­ists work­ing in news­pa­pers, ra­dio and tele­vi­sion, as well as new me­dia.More in­for­ma­tion on the awards are avail­able at the Web site www.iica.int/trinidadand­to­ba­go.