Imported Food is a "Budget-busting Problem" for the Caribbean

Doing Too Little, Too Much, Or Just Enough?

The New York Times reports that "food imports have become a budget-busting problem" and a "threat to finances and health" across the Caribbean, prompting the region's nations to implement practices and policies to "make farming patriotic and ubiquitous, behind homes, hospitals, schools, even prisons."

One minister of agriculture quoted in the article stated that "Every country is concerned about it.  How can we produce our own?  How can we feed our own?"  Across the region,  governments are answering these questions by giving out thousands of seed kits to home farmers, by establishing hundreds of school gardens maintained by students and teachers, by sending students out on missions to plant thousands of trees, and even “building a gleaming food science university” in the Bahamas.

In places like the Caribbean and the southern United States, where "farming is still often seen as a reminder of plantations and slavery," more and more people are making the more astute observation that our region's dependence on food imports obtained at a crippling cost is modern economic slavery that continues the exploitation of our people and islands for the benefit of other nations.

The drive for food security across the region is having mixed results, according to the Times article; many home farmers give up due to increased water bills and theft of their goods, many local consumers have acquired a preference for foreign foods, and local food processing and preservation capability remain severely under-developed.  These challenges are well within the region's power to overcome, and overcoming them is the only option in the face of the over-burdened budgets and the food insecurity promised by continued dependency on imported foods.

Today's food dependency, together with the uncertainties of future climate change and the vicissitudes of the global economy, keep the region set for a repeat of the food shortages of 2008 when the cost of food reached “new heights” and “exporting countries were holding on to food for their own populations.”  Perhaps Virgin Islanders believe that our relationship to the United States makes us permanently immune to the shortages suffered by our neighbors.  As the cost of imported foods in the Territory continues to skyrocket beyond our ability to pay, however, aren’t the choices we are forced to make every time we shop for food already creating real shortages at home for our children and for ourselves?  How many families with three or four children today can put out a variety of fresh fruit everyday and let their children eat as much as they want and as much as they need for their future good health?

According to the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis, Virgin Islanders spent three hundred and nine million dollars in 2010 on mostly imported "foods, feeds, and beverages."  Although our population is less than 4% the size of Jamaica’s, we spent over 30% of what Jamaica spent on imported food.  Per capita, Virgin Islanders are spending a ridiculous amount of money on imported foodstuffs as compared to our neighbors.  If our neighbors’ expenditures on imported foods constitute a “food crisis,” what in the world do these numbers tell us about our own situation?   

What do the numbers tell us about our situation when the food stamps run out and a pound of grapes from the States costs ten dollars instead of the nearly five dollars it costs today?   How will we feed ourselves and our children then?  How much more will we accept diabetes, cancer, obesity, high blood pressure, and more as normal for ourselves and our children when it is well known and well documented that a nutritionally inferior diet of highly-processed foods and low intake of fresh fruits and vegetables are major contributors to these diseases?  How much longer can we deny that food security in the Virgin Islands is a dangerous illusion, not a reality?  Many more Virgin Islanders today are demanding answers to these questions.  It is not only their right to do so, it is their duty, both for themselves and for the sake of their children and their children's children.

Picture Source:

N.d. Photograph. Department of Agriculture, St. Croix, USVI. Web. 14 Aug 2013. <http://www.vifresh.com/index.php>.

Information Sources:

Cave, Damien. "As Cost of Importing Food Soars, Jamaica Turns to the Earth." New York Times [New York] 03 AUG 2013, n. pag. Web. 14 Aug. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/world/americas/as-cost-of-importing-food-soars-jamaica-turns-to-the-earth.html?pagewanted=all>.

Hamano, Aya, and Wali Osman. United States. Bureau of Economic
   Analysis. Bureau of Economic Analysis (Bea) Releases Estimates
   of Gross Domestic Product, Gross Domestic Product by Industry,
   Compensation by Industry, and Detailed Consumer Spending for 
   the U.S. Virgin Islands. Washington, DC: , 2012. Web.
   <http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/general/terr/2012
   /vigdp_10152012.pdf>.