Food in­se­cu­ri­ty is de­fined by the UN’s Food and Agri­cul­ture Or­gan­i­sa­tion (FAO) as a sit­u­a­tion where “peo­ple lack se­cure ac­cess to suf­fi­cient amounts of safe and nu­tri­tious food for nor­mal growth and de­vel­op­ment and an ac­tive and healthy life.” This is a state that ap­plies to ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100,000 cit­i­zens of this coun­try—al­most eight per cent of the pop­u­la­tion, ac­cord­ing to the lat­est avail­able da­ta—who are un­der­nour­ished.

Hunger a very re­al prob­lem in T&T and it needs to be ad­dressed. World Food Day, which is be­ing ob­served to­day, is not on­ly about rais­ing aware­ness about the prob­lem of hunger but tak­ing ac­tion to erad­i­cate it.

It is un­like­ly that this coun­try can con­tribute to the glob­al ob­jec­tive of ze­ro hunger in any sig­nif­i­cant way since the goal of food se­cu­ri­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty has elud­ed us for many years. In a na­tion with an ap­petite for im­port­ed foods, progress hinges on the re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion of the agri­cul­ture sec­tor which is still not with­in sight, not even af­ter Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert’s an­nounce­ment, just over a week ago, of a tax-free des­ig­na­tion for the sec­tor.

At present agri­cul­ture con­tributes less than 0.5 per cent an­nu­al­ly to GDP and while it has been iden­ti­fied as one of the sec­tors to dri­ve T&T’s eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion, many long-stand­ing prob­lems have not been ad­dressed.

For agri­cul­ture to thrive, the labour short­ages and land tenure is­sues must be tack­led once and for all and re­al ef­forts have to be made to de­vel­op re­silience to the weath­er and cli­mate change events that have af­fect­ed pro­duc­tion.

Re­cent fig­ures from the sec­tor are not en­cour­ag­ing. Be­tween 2011 and 2016, this coun­try im­port­ed $32.7 bil­lion in food, even while sig­nif­i­cant de­clines in co­conut, cof­fee and co­coa pro­duc­tion were be­ing record­ed large­ly due to pests, dis­eases, and in­ef­fi­cient tech­nol­o­gy. Rice pro­duc­tion has de­clined by 90 per cent since the 1990s due to low pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and prae­di­al lar­ce­ny has been a con­stant plague with oth­er tra­di­tion­al food crops.

To en­sure food se­cu­ri­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty, T&T must in­vest in ini­tia­tives that will build out its agri­cul­tur­al ca­pa­bil­i­ties and place the lo­cal food sys­tem on a sol­id foun­da­tion. Bud­get promis­es aside, se­ri­ous ef­forts must be made to im­prove agri­cul­tur­al re­silience through mod­erni­sa­tion, pro­duc­tion ef­fi­cien­cy, scale and con­sis­ten­cy.

Some ground­break­ing work has been done at The UWI’s Fac­ul­ty of Food and Agri­cul­ture which points the way for the lev­el of re­search and tech­nol­o­gy need­ed. It is nec­es­sary to de­vel­op and iden­ti­fy bet­ter yield­ing va­ri­eties of food crops and re­duce loss­es due to pests, dis­eases and poor farm­ing prac­tices. Live­stock and fish­eries are al­so in need of tech­ni­cal sup­port for pos­i­tive out­comes.

There is no quick or easy route out of our cur­rent state of food in­se­cu­ri­ty. How­ev­er, erad­i­cat­ing hunger re­quires that T&T be­comes a na­tion that can feed it­self.