Plagues, food security and ration cards

THE EDITOR: While the Government has launched its vigorous attack against an invisible enemy, the covid19 virus, please let’s consider that there are two other tangible plagues which are affecting our health, financial well-being and food security.

Beginning in 2008, north Trinidad, from Petit Valley to Arima, has the pestilence of giant African snails. Annual swarms of locusts in south-east Trinidad have been growing worse since 2015. Compounding everything, oil and gas prices have fallen.

UWI economist Dr Roger Hosein recently commented on our energy income. He stated that tension between Russia and Saudi Arabia could lead to a further plunging of global oil prices, and this country’s energy revenues.

He added that “the country’s reliance on imported food and overall food security also could be affected, given the import and export restrictions being implemented by governments, because of the global coronavirus outbreak.”

He continued: “We have a food import bill of around US$800 million…We need to hear from the Minister of Agriculture what are the medium-term plans should the import of food become compromised in the next three months. How are we going to feed the nation?”

Likewise, spokesperson for the co-operative credit union movement, Letitia Telesford, president of the Central Finance Facility, called on the Government to fast-track the implementation of a national food security plan immediately after covid19 is contained.

Omardath Maharaj, agricultural economist, said that immediate steps must be taken to safeguard food security in the light of collapsing economies triggered by the pandemic.

To cope partially with the economic fallout that will come with these three plagues, TT has to change its taste for imported foods.

We had been warned about these matters before but we have not paid heed. One PNM administration declared 1965 Buy Local Year. If I remember correctly, a PNM committee under Jack Lewsey organised a buy local campaign with the Trinidad Manufacturers Association, complete with buy local Carnival parade and calypso competition.

NJAC played its part. The 1970 movement revived the passion for agriculture among many youths in TT.

Ask older members of NJAC as well as Shiraz Khan, president of the Sheep and Goat Farmers Association, if anyone wants to hear the story of how the infamous late police commissioner Randolph Burroughs and the Flying Squad levelled the young people’s plantations with fire and machine-guns.

The late UWI professor Dr George Sammy lectured to NJAC about food security, just as he did to the wider society.

Prof Bridget Brereton’s 2012 tribute to Sammy stated, “He was also a tireless advocate and public educator in the cause of self-reliance and what would today be called food security: eating more of what we produce, reducing our dependence on imported foods, changing our culturally and historically determined taste preferences for foreign commodities.

“His role at the Food Technology Unit was to contribute to national and regional self-reliance by processing food from our own agriculture. Sammy pioneered and taught modes of canning, bottling, preserving, drying and processing the products of local farming for commercial markets at home and abroad. Among the better-known products from this work were sorrel concentrate, instant yam flakes and flour made from a blend of wheat and sweet potatoes.”

Cariri was established in 1970. Around the same time Hazel Brown and HATT began campaigning against high-priced imported foods and promoted local food production. Lately Alpha Sennon and the WhyFarm project have emerged.

The advocacy and warnings have been there. It is imperative that we ease the tension, “the arm wrestling,” between the Government and Opposition, as Commander Garvin Heerah observed, and mobilise the country to face an impending crisis over food security.

If we don’t, we may see a return to the ration cards which my late mother and others had to use during and after the Second World War.

Do we really want that?

AIYEGORO OME

Mt Lambert