Director of the National Botanical Gardens, Nigel Jones, wants more Natural Sciences to be placed on the curriculum.
Some of the persons in attendance at the UDC’s Garden Beautification Competition launch yesterday.
SHIFT FOCUS TO NATURAL SCIENCES
Tue, 04/19/2016 - 12:00am
Traditional jobs will not feed country
By:
Jenique Belgrave
WITH the effects of climate change already having an impact on food security, this island must place its focus on producing less lawyers and doctors and instead more natural scientists. To this end, Director of the National Botanical Gardens Nigel Jones insisted that disciplines like taxonomy, plant anatomy and dendrology should be introduced to the curriculum instead of continuing to emphasise on the more traditional vocations.
Speaking at the Urban Development Commission’s Bridge Street office yesterday, he pointed out for example, that there were two areas that were critical now to ensure food security – plant genetics and crop nutrition.
“As there is an increase in population and the sea level rises above the coastline, we have to look at how we can sustain food nutrition ... because as more and more pests and diseases encroach on our space, we have to look at ways to counterbalance that,” he added.
Jones went even further saying that Government should offer scholarships mainly in these areas, as these would be of a national good, while allowing those who wanted
to pursue a degree in the traditional disciplines to pay their own way.
“Sometimes there are some negative drawbacks to democracy, and we are still of the view that our children should be involved in the older disciplines. Sometimes democracy ... should take a backseat. If you were in prison, you would have to eat what is given... So if on the curriculum you decide that you are putting these things there, you have to eat them,” he argued.
The dendrologist, therefore, called for public education on food security and the vocations that went along with it, remarking that this was the way to get students interested in pursuing such a path.
At the launch of the UDC’s Garden Beautification Competition, Jones pointed out that there was knowledge being lost daily on many of the once widespread uses of various crops and emphasised that a bridge had to be created between what the population used to know and its present circumstances.