IGCAT’s founder wants farmers to capitalise on region’s multibillion-dollar festival calendar

WESTERN BUREAU:

Nneka Nurse, founder and CEO of Bestdressedplate and Global Expert for the Caribbean International Institute of Gastronomy, Culture, Arts and Tourism (IGCAT), says the region’s booming festival calendar is feeding thousands of people but Caribbean farmers risk being left hungry for their share of the billions of dollars being spent on food.

As as consequence, she is calling on festival organisers to open their books and track exactly what they buy, how much they buy and who supplies the food.

“Festivals, there’s going to be a purchasing decision, and that money goes to a farmer, a fisher, a producer here at home, or it goes out the region,” said Nurse, in outlining her concern during a plenary session on Food Safety and Cultural Identity on day three of the 20th Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA), which is taking place at the Ocean Coral Spring Resort, in Trelawny, from September 27 to October 2.

Nurse said the issue must be viewed against the Caribbean’s continuing struggle to reduce its food import bill, with the CARICOM ‘25 by 2025 Plus Five’ target now extended to 2030.

“When you look at our festival calendar, how can we find ways to reduce that bill? And it’s through food,” she told delegates.

According to her, major events such as Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, Crop Over in Barbados, Jamaica Carnival and Spicemas in Grenada bring thousands of people together and create concentrated demand for food.

Yet, she said, the region cannot determine how much of that spending reaches farmers because the necessary data is not being collected.

“If we can’t see where the festival money goes, then the farmers can’t compete for it because they don’t know it’s there until it’s gone,” Nurse said.

She proposed the creation of a regional festival sourcing tracker to record what festivals purchase, the quantities required and who supplies the food.

Such a system, she said, would allow farmers to identify future demand and plan production accordingly.

According to Allister Glean, a representative of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) in Barbados, the problem extends beyond festivals into the wider tourism industry.

“While we are happy to support the chefs and the culinary arts, we want to boost food production,” he said.

Glean said IICA’s experience with its Chefs for Development Programme showed that chefs alone cannot transform procurement because they are often not the people making purchasing decisions.

“The chefs are coming on board, but most times the chefs are not the decision makers, so they will put on a nice offering. They will do a nice pop-up, but nothing really happens,” he said, arguing that hotels must provide farmers with reliable information about demand.

“Farmers will tell you they cannot plan unless they have data,” he said.

Food security policy specialist Dr Arlette Saint Ville, of The University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus, said an initial study identified 88 food festivals across 14 Caribbean countries, underscoring the scale of that emerging market.

“This is a secret way of talking about food security by integrating agri and tourism,” she said.

However, she cautioned that the growth in food festivals does not necessarily translate into greater income for farmers.

“We see a production linkage gap,” she said, adding that policymakers need to determine where festival food is sourced, whether farmers are benefiting directly and how much of the value is being captured by intermediaries.

The CWA event is being staged under the theme ‘The New Face of Caribbean Food System.’

albert.ferguson@gleanerjm.com