Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Se­vere food in­se­cu­ri­ty is up by 72 per cent in the Caribbean re­gion since the start of the pan­dem­ic, ac­cord­ing to a sur­vey done by the Unit­ed Na­tions’ World Food Pro­gramme (UN WFP) in part­ner­ship with Cari­com.

The sur­vey was con­duct­ed in four rounds, the first be­ing in April 2020 and the last in Feb­ru­ary 2022. As part of the in­crease, the re­sults show 44 per cent of it oc­curred be­tween 2021 and 2022. The over­all in­crease rep­re­sents al­most 10 per cent of the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean’s pop­u­la­tion.

Pre­sent­ing the sur­vey’s re­sults on Tues­day, UN WFP Caribbean pro­gramme pol­i­cy of­fi­cer Amy Chong said it com­prised over 6,000 re­spon­dents, the ma­jor­i­ty of whom were from T&T fol­lowed by Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica.

While the most re­cent sur­vey showed 10 per cent of the re­gion (693,000) was se­vere­ly food in­se­cure, it al­so showed an ad­di­tion­al 29 per cent mod­er­ate­ly food in­se­cure (2,059,000). The first sur­vey at the on­set of the pan­dem­ic in April 2020 showed six per cent se­vere­ly food in­se­cure while 19 per cent were mod­er­ate­ly food in­se­cure.

Eval­u­at­ing the ex­pe­ri­ences of food se­cu­ri­ty, Chong said the sur­vey re­vealed, “around 50 per cent of re­spon­dents are re­port­ing to on­ly eat­ing a few kinds of food, they were un­able to eat healthy food and they were al­so wor­ried they did not have enough food to eat.”

She said those in the be­low-av­er­age in­come lev­els were most prone to se­vere and mod­er­ate food in­se­cu­ri­ty.

The sur­vey al­so linked the dis­rup­tion in liveli­hoods and job loss to one’s abil­i­ty ac­cess to food. In­ter­est­ing­ly, she said re­spon­dents from T&T were among those who be­lieve their liveli­hoods were like­ly to be af­fect­ed in the fu­ture.

She not­ed that on­ly two per cent of re­spon­dents were cur­rent­ly re­ceiv­ing gov­ern­ment as­sis­tance for food out of the over­all 22 per cent who said they re­ceived as­sis­tance dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.

The study pro­duced five rec­om­men­da­tions for the re­gion to im­prove its food se­cu­ri­ty. The first is to in­crease in­vest­ments in agri-food sys­tems, re­gion­al food pro­duc­tions, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and trade and de­vel­op tar­get­ed ini­tia­tives to re­solve bot­tle­necks to im­port re­duc­tion. The sec­ond is to ac­cel­er­ate ini­tia­tives on dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and da­ta to pro­mote food sys­tems and food se­cu­ri­ty. Its third rec­om­men­da­tion is to de­vel­op and ex­pand cre­ative ini­tia­tives to in­crease de­mand for lo­cal foods. They al­so rec­om­mend ad­vo­cat­ing for tai­lored fi­nanc­ing terms, de­vel­op­ing in­no­v­a­tive risk-in­formed fi­nanc­ing op­tions and ac­cel­er­at­ing ef­forts to ac­cess cli­mate fi­nance. Last­ly, it rec­om­mend­ed the re­gion ex­pand so­cial pro­tec­tion and so­cial ser­vices and in­vest in sys­tems to re­spond to fu­ture shocks.