…carried away
Your Eyewitness was quite chuffed that we’ve cut our food imports by 15% in our Caricom drive to achieve an overall reduction of 25% by 2025. In a slogan – 25 by 25!! But this push for “food security” in the Caribbean is kinda ironic when you think about it, innit? Weren’t our Indigenous Peoples Columbus stumbled across, eating and living? We know for a fact they ate very balanced diets and didn’t complain about food security!! vitamins) they had fruits like pineapples, mammee, sapodilla, star apples, genips, guavas and cashews etc. They cultivated maize (corn) on a large scale with cassava, sweet potatoes and yautia etc as staples. They made cassava flour and cassava bread. For meat they ate all sorts of small animals that were grilled, baked or used in “pepper-pot” with cassareep the main flavour!!
But our problems came when the Europeans insisted these folks who’d co-existed for millennia with their environment were “uncivilized” – and everything about them were to be discarded. Including them – who were soon wiped out, excepting in Guyana. The Europeans did things “their way” – including the foods they ate. And as they brought waves of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians, Chinese, Portuguese, etc, European’s tastes became the “civilized” tastes and as such were desired by those who wanted to be “with it” and move up!!
Most foods come from plants and in another ironical twist, our entire sustenance in the modern global system is because of agriculture!! We in the WI were shanghaied to pioneer this earliest of human endeavour on an industrial scale! So, what happened? Well, the Europeans decided we’d produce those exotic (to them) crops like sugar cane, tobacco and spices – while importing most consumable food from Europe – and keep THEIR farmers working!!
Now all of this we already know: hadn’t Burnham and Manley struck their 70s leftist pose and decided we were gonna feed ourselves?? They were talking about “food security” before “food insecurity”?? Not really!! They were reacting to their economies collapsing like houses of cards and they just didn’t have foreign exchange to import the foods wthey’d been weaned on!! And craved. Didn’t Burnham cry out for “condensed milk” on his death bed??
Anyhow while there’s nothing wrong moving off “foreign foods” along with increased local production. Let’s develop our mega agri and industrial exports and use the foreign exchange earned to buy whatever other things we desired!! And for sure let’s not waste too much time and effort to grow things we like from foreign. Like Jamaica producing Irish potato right – but at EIGHT TIMES the imported price!!
The principle of comparative advantage still holds – produce those things we have an advantage.
It’s said that every man’s home is his castle – with the expectation he’s gonna be left in peace to do as he pleases there. But even though the Middle Ages are long gone and one would’ve thought folks using battering rams to break into castles were over and done with, from the eighties we had our “kick-down-the-door-bandits”. Inspired by the PNC’s terroristic onslaught on the citizenry to keep them cowed for Burnham’s dictatorship. That’s left a lasting legacy of windows and doors grated with steel bars so most Guyanese actually live voluntarily in JAILS!! But there still isn’t security of mind in the grated castles – witness reports of folks regularly burglarized and even killed.
But now, there’s another irony – with oil revenues pouring in and our GDP the fastest growing in the WORLD, crimes are increasing as every body wants a piece of the action NOW!! Physical security’s even more pressing than food security – since it affects the rich and poor.
Let’s set some goals on crime reduction. 25 by 25??
…complacent
One of the ways to get a piece of the new economy is to prepare yourself for it. Towards that end it’s heartening to see the MoE revising technical and vocational (TVET) Curriculum in Grades 7-9 to customize it for jobs!!
