EDITORIAL - Back to basics

As Barbados continues to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been a few calls for Barbadians to return to backyard gardening, or home gardening as some refer to it, to reduce their reliance on imported goods and to better ensure food security going forward.

Indeed, there is need for a greater focus on agriculture and all it has to offer, and we are truly realising this as we try to endure and emerge from this pandemic.

We may need to go back to the basics and employ some of the key methods our grandparents and great grandparents used to supplement their food supply. For those who do not have a backyard, the focus is on home gardening, essentially ensuring that households can have an area around the house where they can plant key crops or food items.

Indeed, we may be a bit better off in terms of the technology to which we now have access, to engage in backyard or home gardening. There are a number of indoor and outdoor plant growers on the market at present, that offer up the right opportunity for householders to engage in the practice of growing their own produce. Even the smallest of units will allow Barbadians to cultivate fresh herbs and seasonings, if they have limited space, and with the right mixture of water, oxygen and nutrients, this can be done on a consistent basis, lessening the need to purchase these items. For those who care not to spend money, then plant pots and discarded, but clean containers can be used to hold soil, in which to plant produce.

Whether we like it or not, the older folks who were into sowing and reaping knew what they were about and they have laid the necessary foundation for us to learn a thing or two. In days gone by, householders grew more of their food and could even swap and barter their produce, and this went a long way in helping them to keep their families well fed.

Yes, we are into the year 2020, but this recent COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us that concepts we once thought were archaic could now prove very useful, if put into practice in this present age.
Though we know that we will still have to run to the supermarkets and minimarts for certain items, wouldn’t it be great if you could simply enter your backyard or patio and pick some of what you need to cook with? Wouldn’t it be nice to swap some of what you grow for some of what a relative or neighbour grows, thereby reducing your food bill?

That said, there has been a call for large tracts of land, which are lying fallow but which can be used for agricultural purposes, to be brought back into production as part of a long-term plan to ensure food security for the nation.

Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS), James Paul, recently suggested this. He pointed out that whilst local farmers have been planting and there is enough food to go around at this time, more needs to be done even beyond the current COVID-19 pandemic to ensure that Barbados as a country is able to produce more of what its citizens consume.

Acknowledging that any plan to encourage Barbadians to plant their own kitchen gardens and their own crops is a good one, he however stressed the need to have production on a much larger scale, and this is something which needs to be seriously considered as well.

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