Even in hysteria, there are some moments of lucidity. So it is with Covid-19. Last week in parliament, the MMM raised a good point about countries stopping the export of food in case the outbreak gets worse, and where that would leave Mauritius. The prime minister shrugged and said that in such an eventuality, every country would be facing their own difficulties. The commerce minister, Yogida Sawmynaden, quickly hosted a press conference to reassure everybody that Mauritius had no shortages of basic commodities and warned traders against hoarding to raise prices. In other words, if the crunch comes, it’s every country for itself.

The fact that food imports can be affected is not far-fetched. When it comes to medicines for example, India that produces nearly 20 per cent of the world’s generic medicine – and a major supplier of pharmaceutical products to Mauritius – announced that it’s cutting down its export of medicine because it itself is facing a shortage since 66 per cent of the raw materials used to manufacture those medicines come from China, where a lot of the factories have been shuttered. When it comes to food, the Food and Agriculture Organization said that between 2007 and 2010, 33 per cent of all countries restricted their food exports in one way or another, either to control food prices or to address shortages. And this is in relatively normal times, not in the case of a pandemic galloping across the globe. Relying on others to feed you is always a gamble at the best of times and even worse in a country with a worsening trade imbalance and a falling rupee.

Now of course all this talk would not be happening had food security not simply been dismissed as an eccentric fad all these decades. The truth is despite paying lip service to the concept, neither government nor business, nor indeed, much of our citizenry has paid much attention to food production. Aside from the short-lived burst of idealism that birthed the Young Farmers’ Clubs in the late 1960s, it’s not been taken very seriously at all. Land was monopolized to grow sugar. When that industry fell, both government and business indulged in a two-decade long bout of irrationality where they adopted the buzzword of a ‘services-oriented’ economy to cover up the fact that Mauritius was deindustrialising, its agriculture was declining and productive investment was drying up. The land in the meanwhile went from being used to grow sugar increasingly to being sold off as luxury real estate.

All this time, even though each Mauritian went from consuming 75 kg of wheat a year in 2004 to 85 kg in 2018, from 41 kg of meat to 56 kg and 19 kg of fish to 22 kg, it’s actually producing less food than a decade ago (114,844 tonnes in 2010 and 96,847 tonnes in 2018), deepening its reliance on imports to feed its people. Despite having 2.3 million square kilometres of ocean, it has no fishing or merchant fleet, as each government dreams of striking oil one day, while ignoring the most obvious uses of the sea.

Now with Covid-19 showing just how each country must look to its own, the silver lining of all this should be that perhaps after government and business realise that nobody is bound to put food on our tables in times of crisis, food production would be taken more seriously.

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