In case you are wondering who are these scientists that I am hailing up, they are the brave band of brothers and sisters who serve this island at the Department of Agriculture. Brave men and women, they are indeed, fighting a gallant battle to keep our island fed with food from the local soil.
It is an uphill struggle to convince the local population that local food is more nutritious than food from foreign soil and that our consumption of local food would lower the cost of living, keep our population healthy and provide incomes for the farmers who strive to keep us fed with local food.
Dr. Jerome Thomas and the small army of scientists who have made food production their life work in St. Kitts, deserve the highest praise for the recent exhibition of agro-products which they so grandly displayed before the public. Dr. Thomas and his staff deserve the right to be proud of their achievements over the past thirteen years in which they have staged their agricultural spectaculars for their astonished spectators.
This year’s Open Day was in a sense the most spectacular on account of the significant variety of the exhibits.
These ranged from the humble but therapeutic tea-bush to the bottles of honey, wild and manufactured; from the mass of peanuts to the branded packets of the local items; from the huge watermelons and pumpkins to the bottled and sealed local drinks of ginger beer, mauby, passion fruit and lemonade, from the sweet and white potato, the hot and sweet peppers, the many other healthy looking vegetables, to the preparation of these local foods and the many stalls scattered on the grounds which sweetened the palates of many satisfied visitors.
At this year’s exhibition the sugar cake and the cassava bread held their own and so did the locally produced hot pepper sauce.
One of the lessons which has band of agricultural scientists his tried to teach our population at all levels is that St. Kitts can produce a lot of the food which we need to feed our people.
This lesson is worth our notice. Of the foods which sustain us as staples in our diet, we have to concede that Rice and Wheat flour must come from abroad because we do not have the swamps to grow rice and the temperate climate to cultivate wheat.
These items apart however, what else do we eat that we cannot obtain from the local soil? Or from the local sea?
Poultry? I suggest that St. Kitts is capable of producing all the poultry that we need to cook in our kitchens and to consume from the various chicken-fryers. In order to produce the abundance of poultry that we consume, there must be a central producer of eggs and one or more hatcheries where the eggs will be incubated into baby chicks.
The central egg resource and hatchery will be fed by contract growers whose work will be the caring and nurturing of these baby chicks into maturity.
The same strategy suggested for the raising of poultry can be taken for the raising of pork. A central processing plant with numerous pig contractors revolving round it can produce an unprecedented volume of pork which will help our population to avoid the consumption of expensive foreign pork.
Poultry and Pork farming can become so widespread in St. Kitts that surpluses will earn foreign exchange from the export of these food items to some of the small non farming islands in the neighbourhood.
The most recent excitement in the field of a agriculture is beekeeping. The art of beekeeping has been practiced for many years in St. Kitts, pioneered by the late Ralph Vanier and his associates. It has now become a more common activity under the stimulus of the Department of Agriculture whose bee-keeping cooperative supervises both the education in and the practice of making honey.
The honey is good and marketable and proudly adorns the shelves of our supermarkets.
We need more honey, he demand for which extraordinary. It promises to become the major small industry of the next generation. Honey can be produced on the same strategy of pork and poultry, by small contract bee-keepers who will sell their honey to the bee-keepers cooperative for delivery to the market.
The message from Dr. Thomas and his trained and qualified team is that the scope for the production of local food is unlimited and that there is an uprising farming community which is ready to respond to every encouragement to feed the local and tourist population.
All of this potential will be lost without land. Present farmers want more land to extend their small farms to full capacity and new upcoming ambitions young farmers want three-acre plots on which to lunch their farming career.
The production of local food is an urgent imperative.
