Spending an entire morning with food and agriculture experts on Tuesday for the launch of agricultural scientist Steve Maximay's Climate-Smart Agriculture Compliance (C-SAC) tool had the potential to be a disastrously-laborious undertaking. But it wasn't.
Agriculture, you see, remains a veritable bastard child of Caribbean development while kilowatt hours of energy expended is often (foolishly) expressed as an axiomatic measure of social and economic progress.
It's almost as if, among our political and bureaucratic elites, we can expect to find no shortage of climate change sceptics, together with those who routinely apply the misplaced principle that "food security" simply means an ability to acquire what we need to fill our bellies.
Maximay, like so many other experts nowadays, prefers use of the term "nutrition security" over the now-unfashionable idea that it's okay simply to be able to stock the grocery shelves.Look around you and see if what I am saying is not true. We seem to have got it all wrong in T&T.
The uninitiated would no doubt have to isolate the several concepts captured by Maximay's innovative contribution to the world of food and agriculture and to the development process in general via his C-SAC tool. What, for starters, does "climate-smart agriculture" really mean? And what are some of the essential assumptions for taking anyone in the direction of exploring such a challenge?
Don't ask me the technical details, but I think I know a little about some of the discrete elements of the probl�matique invoked by Maximay's C-SAC approach to assessing the degree to which agricultural projects of all types and sizes are able to comply with set scientific standards and values to reflect reductions in the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while achieving increased yields and better quality produce.
One of the people responsible for my ability (and that of many, many others) to interpret much of what I heard was actually on hand to lend his support to the project and to explore prospects for the funding of the application of C-SAC measures.
Dr Arlington Chesney was the one, both as an official of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) over ten years ago, and later as executive director of the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (Cardi), who recognised the value of enhanced capacity within the Caribbean media for competent coverage of food and agriculture issues.
On Tuesday, I labelled his enlightened intervention more than a decade ago as part of the process of building a framework for "media-smart" development in the field of agriculture. Such a venture now seems to have been put on hold, unfortunately.
So, for me, establishing the link between the production of food and the challenges presented by climate change was something I had encountered before. Being "climate-smart" acknowledges a relationship between the pursuit of any economic activity and the fact of climate variability and climate change.
It was more than 11 years ago that the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) collaborated on the publication of a handbook to assist with coverage of climate change issues in the Caribbean–about the same time we were introduced to the framing of a regional approach to sustainable agriculture through the (Bharrat) "Jagdeo Initiative" for agriculture.
Much of it, at the time, could have passed for convenient political posturing–though there was also no shortage of this–but the convergence of concerns was an authentic outcome of several reality checks being forcefully delivered upon our populations in the region.
More intense weather episodes, unseasonal weather, drought and storms and food import bills that were increasing the load on already challenged economies.
Put them all together and it was easy to see how challenged we are in adapting to and mitigating the combined impact of these phenomena.Those in the know are not always optimistic. Successive studies have returned unimpressive results.
There is now evidence that even through the years of economic buoyancy, T&T continued to battle "undernourishment"–7.4 per cent of the population, according to the 2015 FAO Report on the State of Food Insecurity–and dramatic increases in non-communicable diseases linked to lifestyle practices including the consumption of poor quality.
This is nothing to do with a shortage of food. Health minister, Terrence Deyalsingh, has been making the point.No wonder the agriculture experts are now not paying as much attention to the amount of food available as to the quality of what is being offered.
The equation seems simple enough: low domestic production accompanied by the availability of foreign exchange has contributed to an increase in dependence on imported processed food.
What Maximay's tool challenges us to pay attention to is the persistence of all this against the backdrop of emerging climate factors that can inhibit real development in the domestic food sector. Media-smart agricultural planning should ensure these realities do not escape the attention of our population, while climate-smart agriculture addresses this important issue of our viability and survival as a sovereign state.