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Saturday, July 5, 2025

The science of food security

by

1884 days ago
20200507
Hakim Rahim works on his farm in Aranguez, San Juan, in April.

Hakim Rahim works on his farm in Aranguez, San Juan, in April.

ANISTO ALVES

One of the great myths be­ing per­pe­trat­ed in the des­per­a­tion of COVID-19 is that To­ba­go, or Trinidad, or Ja­maica, or oth­er Caribbean is­lands, can achieve “food se­cu­ri­ty” by “go­ing back to agri­cul­ture” and “pur­su­ing food self-suf­fi­cien­cy.”

It is usu­al­ly as­sert­ed fer­vent­ly in tones used to tell the sto­ry of Joseph and his tech­ni­colour dream coat. The idea is wild­ly at­trac­tive since we im­port a lot of our food.

Trinidad and To­ba­go im­ports about US$700 mil­lion worth of food an­nu­al­ly from all over the world. In Ja­maica, the fig­ure is just un­der US$1 bil­lion. It is per­haps time to sort the sci­ence from the myth.

For any Caribbean is­land, food se­cu­ri­ty means that it can have re­li­able ac­cess to enough food of suit­able va­ri­ety and nu­tri­tion, af­ford­able for all cit­i­zens, what­ev­er their sta­tion.

The first prob­lem with the idea of go­ing back to agri­cul­ture and pur­su­ing food self-suf­fi­cien­cy is the lim­it­ed va­ri­ety we can pro­duce. Man shall not live by dasheen, sweet pota­to and pi­geon peas alone, nor shall women eat on­ly small ru­mi­nants for meat. Good nu­tri­tion for­bids it, to say noth­ing of good and vari­able taste.

The ex­perts in food and nu­tri­tion gen­er­al­ly in­di­cate that we can pro­duce on­ly about 30 per cent of the var­i­ous foods we need for va­ri­ety and good nu­tri­tion.

Giv­en that bench­mark, two ques­tions must be an­swered re­gard­ing re­li­able ac­cess to agri­cul­tur­al pro­duce. Should we pro­duce what we can, and if so on what scale? From where do we im­port what we can­not, and how do we pay for it? Nei­ther ques­tion has sim­ple an­swers nor do the prin­ci­ples of af­ford­abil­i­ty or cost ex­plain why.

What do we pro­duce
and on what scale?

The ba­sic an­swer is found in what econ­o­mists call re­al in­ter­nal (na­tion­al) cost–out­put for­gone. Say a mod­el is­land such as To­ba­go can pro­duce low-skilled low-pro­duc­tiv­i­ty food and high-skilled high-pro­duc­tiv­i­ty ed­u­ca­tion, health­care, or tourism ser­vices. If a work­er is tak­en from ed­u­ca­tion, med­i­cine, or skilled tourism sec­tors, re­trained, and moved in­to food to boost its pro­duc­tion, the so­ci­ety must give up the high amount of prod­ucts which that work­er pro­duced.

By con­trast, if a work­er is tak­en from food, re­trained, and moved in­to ed­u­ca­tion, health­care, or tourism, the amount of food giv­en up is very low. So, the re­al cost of mov­ing work­ers in­to food pro­duc­tion is very high while that of mov­ing work­ers in­to ed­u­ca­tion, health­care and tourism is very low. This com­par­a­tive re­al cost is the main rea­son Arthur Lewis rec­om­mend­ed long ago that Caribbean is­lands fo­cus on de­vel­op­ing, pro­duc­ing and ex­port­ing these in­dus­tri­al out­puts and im­port their food.

What if we feel too in­se­cure to im­ple­ment that strat­e­gy and de­cide to pro­duce at least some of what­ev­er we can? Well, ok. How­ev­er, we must then face the re­al­i­ty that on the flip side of that move is the re­duc­tion of the price of the pro­duced food on the lo­cal (and glob­al) mar­ket.

Many fac­tors make

the price of food low

One is that high per­isha­bil­i­ty when fresh cre­ates a buy­ers’ mar­ket, with pro­duc­ers hav­ing to cut prices to dis­pose of the pro­duce be­fore spoilage. This is a ma­jor rea­son post-har­vest pro­cess­ing is wide­ly prac­ticed. It not on­ly elim­i­nates the buy­ers’ mar­ket but al­so rais­es the price of the pre­served food. An­oth­er rea­son for low food prices is the low wage of farm­work­ers, kept down by their low av­er­age food out­put. In any event, if food se­cu­ri­ty is our main con­cern, the price of food has to be kept low to en­sure that per­sons of every sta­tion can af­ford to buy it.

So, as a gen­er­al rule, food will have to be sub­sidised if work­ers and oth­er re­sources are to be re­de­ployed to pro­duce it. These sub­si­dies are ob­served across the world, in coun­tries like the USA with mech­a­nised agri­cul­ture and In­dia with most­ly un­mech­a­nised peas­ant farm­ing. This al­so means that we must de­ter­mine the source of the sur­plus funds to fa­cil­i­tate the sub­si­dies.

The gen­er­al an­swer is from (tax­es on) ex­ports of high-pro­duc­tiv­i­ty ed­u­ca­tion, health­care and tourism ser­vices. Those items fetch rel­a­tive­ly high prices in their mar­kets be­cause of high de­mand. But what if we can­not sub­sidise the prices? Then, the ma­jor­i­ty of work­ers and farm­ers in agri­cul­ture will strug­gle with a low stan­dard of liv­ing and a high pover­ty rate. This is the sit­u­a­tion in Ja­maica, where tourism has been in­ad­e­quate­ly in­dus­tri­alised, about 6.7 per cent of its out­put comes from agri­cul­ture, 20 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion lives in pover­ty, and most of the poor are in the agri­cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ties. Its GDP per capi­ta is about US$5,300, less than 1/3rd that of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

What about the food we can­not or do not pro­duce?

How will we ac­cess it se­cure­ly? The ba­sic an­swer is by im­port­ing it from a re­li­able source. A po­ten­tial­ly re­li­able source for Caribbean is­lands is con­ti­nen­tal CARI­COM, in Suri­name, Be­lize and Guyana. There, the is­land prob­lem does not ex­ist be­cause the abun­dance of land makes the prod­uct added by a work­er in agri­cul­ture quite high. Con­ti­nen­tal CARI­COM can­not pro­duce all the va­ri­eties we need. Thus the re­li­able for­eign ex­change sup­ply to pay the im­port­ed food bill will come from suf­fi­cient ex­ports of high-pro­duc­tiv­i­ty ed­u­ca­tion, health­care or tourism ser­vices.

There is an­oth­er ma­jor rea­son we have to fo­cus on ex­port­ing these high pro­duc­tiv­i­ty ser­vices. Hu­mans shall not live by food alone, but al­so by trans­port, cloth­ing, hous­ing and a vast range of knowl­edge-in­ten­sive prod­ucts, most of which we im­port. There is lit­tle chance that the ex­port of the sur­plus food we pro­duce could be suf­fi­cient to pay for the food we have to im­port, let alone the cars, com­put­ers and soft­ware we need. The price of food in the ex­port mar­ket will sim­ply be too low. That re­al­i­ty will pre­vail even if we de­vot­ed all our work­ers and man­agers in pro­duc­ing food and oth­er agri­cul­tur­al out­put. The his­to­ry of every Caribbean is­land is proof of that claim, whether we are talk­ing about the his­to­ry of sug­ar and slav­ery, or co­coa and cof­fee, or co­conut or ba­nanas, or ground pro­vi­sions and small ru­mi­nants. In sum­ma­ry, food se­cu­ri­ty in our mod­el is­land so­ci­ety should be achieved by mod­est and high­ly sub­sidised food pro­duc­tion, ex­ports of ex­pert­ly pro­duced in­dus­tri­al ser­vices and im­ports of most of our food from the rest of the world. Af­ter all, we live on one plan­et.


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