PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago, Guardian – More than US$2 billion is spent on the annual food import bill by Caricom countries, which have a combined population of only six million people. Dr Richard Cox, capacity building officer of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, shared the statistic yesterday. “It is worth noting that Caricom itself produced the figures to show that our import food bill runs over US$2 billion every year,” he said. His comments were part of a capacity-building workshop on the NAP/IFS Alignment Process in the Caricom subregion. “A place that has such great soil is importing $2 billion and more of food every year. What sort of food security are you talking about when you have such an import bill and the English-speaking Caribbean is about six million people?” Cox said this was significant and stakeholders must get involved in proper sustainable land management and finding solutions. “If we appreciate that land degradation is really about achieving sustainable development and about the livelihood and the very future existence of some of the most economically vulnerable people on this planet, then we agree that increased land degradation will exacerbate poverty, create greater threat to food security resulting in greater social and economic dislocation,” he said.
