MANAGING director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva is pushing the Caribbean to grow more food for its own food security, even if it means the cost of doing so, in some cases, would have led to different policy choices in the past.

In a change of view which departs from IMF recommendations in the past, Georgieva, who was visiting Barbados last week, opened the discussion on food security while addressing students at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill, said with the world more prone to shocks, food security means countries will have to expand their agriculture sectors to feed themselves rather than relying on cheap imports.

“Remember the old economic textbooks would say cost is your factor determining where production takes place? Wherever it is cheaper, this is where production takes place? We can’t have that concept anymore. There has to be also that element of security of supplies integrated into the way we think about economic efficiency,” the IMF chief told students at the UWI, Cave Hill.

Georgieva, however, outlined that “It doesn’t mean we go to the extreme of saying we are going to produce everything here…that’s not possible to begin with. But having more and more of a supply chain logic that builds this resilience, the security in it, is just a necessity.”

The Caricom food import bill is estimated at US$6 billion and rising costs associated with overlapping crises — the novel coronavirus pandemic, supply chain issues and the war in Ukraine — have pushed food prices up by more than 80 per cent over the last two years, according to the World Bank’s food commodity price index.

“It is actually the right moment to think about more investment in agriculture and especially in resilient agriculture and in agricultural productivity,” she added, referencing the level of increase in food prices in recent times.

“I am of the view that in a world of more frequent shocks that interrupt supplies, that attention to food security does have a domestic component,”

“I was told that during the pandemic, Sandals here in the Caribbean had to import white fish from China, because of interruption to domestic supplies. So think about resilience of domestic production. The ability to project for the future, a more balanced way in how we feed people, especially in a world of changing climate, do we really want to transport all this food with the carbon footprint of that from here to somewhere else and vice-versa. So that rethinking of supply chains, rethinking of security of supply is appropriate especially for food.”

She added: “When 40 to 50 per cent of your income goes to food and fuel and the prices jump, that is a catastrophe. In this environment, we also see the middle class being quite affected, so measures do need to target the vulnerable.”

With rising consumer costs, Georgieva also called for governments to improve welfare targeting for the most vulnerable and pressed higher taxes on the wealthy to help pay for it. “There has to also be some appreciation for the impact on those who are above the poverty line, but not by much. What we see, what we recommend and what we see taking place, is a recognition of inequalities having grown during the pandemic…that cannot continue, because it undermines the social foundation and in that sense, measures that are directed to more progressivity in taxation, so those who can afford to help more, they do. We see in some countries and…this is a positive, a windfall in taxes. Some particular sectors actually benefitted from the pandemic and that is appropriate to share some of these benefits with those who were negatively affected by the pandemic,” she concluded.