CARICOM citizens everywhere are following the Russia-Ukraine crisis keenly, many in ‘Shock and Awe’ and most very worried about the likely collateral damage effects on their lives and livelihoods, homes and families.
Older generations share memories of living through World War II (1939-45), the Korean and Vietnam Wars (50s to 60s) and the middle-aged remember from the Missile Crisis in Cuba (1962) to the Grenada Revolution (1979), while the younger remember the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, NATO’s total destruction of Yugoslavia (1999) and utter devastation of Libya (2011) and the continuing internal wars in Syria and Libya.
The youngest are more familiar with more recent military standoffs in overnight coups in Africa and unending global refugee and immigration crises, the religious hostilities in Sri Lanka and hostilities to Black Lives Matter protests on both sides of the Atlantic.
However, while there’s a region-wide thirst for information about ‘How we got here’ that’s crucial for a better appreciation of the answer, the speed of developments and the endless flow of ‘Live’ information ‘Happening Now’ from vast arrays of mainstream and Social Media sources through ongoing ‘Breaking News’ reports, also helps to further confuse and militates against the uninitiated or curious finding or giving the time to go back-in-time.
Every such crisis brings the Caribbean effects and lessons worth learning and call for CARICOM and national governments to ensure their responses always contribute to the common desire for peaceful solutions to the conflict while cushioning the effects on citizens.
Oil & Gas and Energy supplies globally will surely be affected, with Russia, the biggest single supplier to Europe and a major player on the global oil stage calling the shots in a big way.
The US has assured it will not impose sanctions against Russian oil, while OPEC+ (oil-producers not in OPEC, led by Russia) have pledged to increase production in coming months to between 400,000 and one million barrels-per-day, to soften blows from the crisis in Europe.
The US is also promising to contribute to keeping oil flowing, pledging to contribute 30 million barrels to a 60 million barrels being put on the world market to dampen the effects of price rises with sales not topping US $100 barrels per day.
But the US is also still hoping that Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE) will unite with other OPEC nations to squeeze Russia out of the equation – a very unlikely option.
It’s easy for Caribbean citizens to wish that Guyana will tomorrow be able to automatically fill fuel tanks across CARICOM or Surinam or Trinidad & Tobago will simply each press a button to help Guyana protect CARICOM, but Caribbean citizens’ one common wish is that there was never such a crisis.
Older CARICOM nationals (way over 70) remember the World War II shortages of basic imported food supplies on which the West Indies depended, forcing populations to depend, without choice, on what could have been produced locally, also leading to creation of new foods and drinks now only remembered.
They also remember introduction of new varieties of imported fast-growing food products and nutritious tropical fish like the now-exotic Tilapia Mozambica species.
The shortages also created avenues for development of regional trade, with Guyana’s Rice, Sugar and ‘BG Plantain’ joining the wide range of agricultural products traded across the region through inter-island ferries and later by the two ships (Federal Palm and Federal Maple) donated to the region by then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, to facilitate intra-regional (mainly inter-island) passenger and trade services between Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago.
The Supply Chain problems created during World War II were such that cargo vessels chanced plying Caribbean and Atlantic waters despite the presence of Nazi submarines, but not the current equivalent created by COVID and to be further compounded by the increasing economic sanctions against Russia.
But today’s problem is being more daily felt in people’s pockets and earnings, with prices rising with every shipment of commodities.
Nonetheless, a major wheat shortage is on the horizon, with rather serious implications for all CARICOM nations, as Russia and Ukraine are the biggest world suppliers and any shortages or disruptions are sure to raise the prices of basic items like flour and all other popular wheat-based products of nutritional value, especially in high rice-consuming CARICOM nations like Guyana, Surinam and Trinidad & Tobago.
Whether through visionary planning, early response or sheer coincidence, the Eastern Caribbean Group of Companies (ECGC), one of the top exporters in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) announced at the end of February it will invest over EC $12 million (US$4.5 million) in a new flour mill and other supporting projects in 2022.
Planned to come on stream in mid-2023, the increased capacity of its St. Vincent-based East Caribbean Flour Mills will now allow it to increase production capacity by 30%.
But here too, the effects of the impending crisis will be felt long before.
Caribbean response to the Ukraine crisis will be measured less in what regional governments say and more in the mechanisms they put in place at national and regional levels to cushion the effects.
The responses will differ, but will still be largely negative at the wider regional level, coming just as the believers across the world and Caribbean thought the proverbial ‘wages of sin’ was Death by COVID-19.
In this sense, every government leader and state with lead regional responsibility at presidential or prime ministerial levels for various sectors at the CARICOM level faces the challenge of doubling-up the region’s responses at each level.
But its’s not governments only, as all other national and regional entities committed to increasing Caribbean people’s appreciation of the nutritional and economic value of Caribbean products must also do much more than before to encourage citizens to eat what the region grows and grow what it eats.
And to preferably Buy Caribbean.