WE return to an issue today which cannot be stressed enough, especially as we don’t seem to be anywhere nearer to resolving our difficulties.

In ancient times, every society had to produce enough food to feed its population, or face almost certain starvation. As trade developed, societies that could not produce enough food indulged in barter; exchanging non-food goods for food produced by others, or bought food by paying with gold. In the modern world, countries produce some of their food and import the rest.

Countries that do not have enough arable land import most of their food, eg Singapore. In some cases, their challenge is excessive population, eg China.

In this milieu the goal of food self-sufficiency has been abandoned because it is assumed that importation of food will always be a possibility. Some countries — and Jamaica is a prime example — are dependent on imported food for the staple items in their diet, and so import a large share of their total food requirements. Jamaica’s high and increasing level of dependence on imported food is unwise and risky.

Even more deplorable is that this sorry state of affairs does not have to be so. Jamaica is not producing as much food as it could. Despite the grand announcements, promises and predictions by our ministers of agriculture, local food production continues to struggle.

Jamaica’s dependence on imported food has several dangers, beginning with the fact that in an emergency we could not feed ourselves. Climate change with more frequent and more severe weather events such as droughts and floods can seriously affect the supply of food available on the global market.

Strong demand and prices will make it difficult to feed a world population that is expected to exceed nine billion by 2050. Given the constantly increasing demand for food in countries like China, demand could drive up prices in the short term, as happened a couple of years ago.

Such events are not unlikely, hence a real danger is that a global shortage of an imported food which is a staple of the diet of Jamaicans could pose severe hardships in nutritional and financial terms.

Another danger is the disjuncture between what we as a society eat and what we produce, with adverse implications of depriving the local agricultural sector of a market. There is also the danger that we are not getting the best nutrition for our expenditure on food.

The value of a food starts declining the moment it is harvested, therefore, it is better to eat a freshly picked banana than a tin of fruit cocktail. In this respect a lot of the less expensive imported foods are on the margin of being unhealthy because they are seconds or old stock that are being dumped.

Let us not forget that we are importing a great deal of food which could be produced in Jamaica or for which there are good local substitutes.