You can’t eat the money

“BOY…PINE is tem ah pong now. It get rell expensive!”

This was the response of my local greengrocer to an inquiry about the price of pineapples. I left with a lone bundle of chadon beni, nursing in my heart a poisonous prayer that all his pineapples would rot on their strings.

Of course, it’s not his fault. In the fresh produce cartel ecosystem, he is a price taker, not maker. For consumers buying local fruits semi-regularly, getting used to wild fluctuations in pricing is just the price of admission.

Watermelons soar to the princely heights of $7 per pound one month, and the next farmers are begging you to take them off their hands at $3 or less. And thus life has become all about waiting out fruit prices.

Prices of street drugs are probably more stable than those in the fresh-fruit racket. Not too long ago “fine” thyme had become so scarce I couldn’t find it anywhere – neither in the groceries nor in the fruit and veg shops.

Word on the street among thyme dealers was that this wiry aromatic herb was going through its posh era – flexin’ a price spike so extreme it was impractical to stock the creole cooking staple.

As I’ve become a bit of a purist and a seasonings snob in the kitchen, the concept of any chicken dish without thyme is like a river lime without a duck and white lightning – might as well just forget it.

Food-price inflation is now a nuclear chain reaction without end. From one week to the next, the cost of even modest basket items goes up. Many of the snacks your mothers put in the children’s lunch bags quietly went up by 20 per cent.

Chicken is so expensive that the birds have become weight-conscious, watching what they eat so they don’t tip the scales into unrealistic pricing territory. Nowadays a $50 chicken looks more like a yard fowl that’s known nothing but struggledom.

Accustomed to buttering your bread? Well, it’s time to open those curtains and let in some Golden Ray. For folks on fixed incomes, the inexorable rise in food prices must play havoc with budgeting. Citizens are cornered on all sides by multiple tolls just to sustain existence – gas prices, housing costs, rising utilities, food prices, medical and now…property tax. Meanwhile, for many people, wages remain static.

There are many reasons for food-price inflation – supply-chain disruptions, shipping costs, consumption patterns, energy prices, global conflicts, and harsh climate conditions. It doesn’t help that the majority of the food we eat is imported.

Agriculture was essentially abandoned when we turned to face our oil future. Now, that future is the past and foreign exchange is harder to come by. We’re reaping the bitter harvest of our overreliance on food imports.

Local food production has typically been a disorganized patchwork of farmers eking out a living amid trying circumstances and rising input costs.

This is certainly reflected in the restive pricing in groceries. There’s something intrinsically wrong about getting excited when I see tomatoes have fallen within the range of my budget.

Could there be change germinating as we speak, though? The Government has, for several years, been rolling out a $25 million agricultural grant program.

Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture disbursed $5 million in checks to 50 farmers – $100K might sound like a lot of money on paper, but it can quickly evaporate simply meeting day-to-day expenses.

The funds are meant to help farmers modernize, improve efficiencies, and increase safety (unclear what that means). Additionally, the ministry has been beefing up its praedial larceny squad. This has to be welcome news, as crop theft is a major reason younger people want nothing to do with the sector. The ministry is also said to be providing support services to buttress the grant program.

It all sounds promising, except such initiatives usually fail because support systems meant to sustain them simply don’t exist; farmers are left to their own devices.

It remains to be seen what fruit this program will bear. The agro-incentive grant commenced in 2018. The media should follow up on how it’s working on the ground. A survey of recipients charting the progress of the initiative would tell us whether this is money well spent or burnt.

“Yuh cyah eat de morney, yuh know!” That was my greengrocer, upbraiding a customer who huffed at the cost of a zaboca cradled in yesterday’s news. No, you can’t eat the money – along with a growing grocery list of items our increasingly worthless money can’t buy.