Family farming was the theme of this year's Caribbean Week of Agriculture, held in Paramaribo, Suriname, October 6-12, and the emphasis on enthusing Caribbean youth about farming was evident in a number of the week's activities.
Caribbean families have traditionally dreamed of their children wearing white coats and a stethoscope or suit and tie when choosing a career. Farming has been viewed as the poor second cousin and few parents would state that they aspire to see their children become full-time farmers, even if they themselves are.
The Caribbean Week of Agriculture, or CWA, sought to present farming in a new light, as a field with glitzy opportunities for bright, entrepreneurial young professionals, particularly those interested in ICT and technology. The CWA 2014 featured an AgriHackathon, with nearly 200 entries from around the region, in which young people were challenged to use their ICT skills to develop apps that would be useful to farmers and farming. Several interesting apps were developed by young people including schoolgirls, as well as a team of youngsters, 14 and 15 years old, from T&T.
The young developers received training and mentoring in developing their apps for the final leg of the competition, having won the national competition in their countries. The winners, a team from Jamaica, received 5,000 euros and six months mentorship to further develop their app, making it market ready. The second and third-placed winners won 4,000 and 3,000 euros respectively, along with the six-month mentorship.
Michael Hailu, director of CWA's co-sponsor, the ACP-EU Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), in his opening address said the CTA was making a special effort to engage young people in agriculture in ways that they could relate to, "using new technologies that are far removed from the old image of farming."
The need for more young people to enter farming is indeed an important consideration in the light of the region's farmers being generally well past the age of 40. That is a worrying reality since our region's ability to feed itself is already abysmally low and the Caribbean currently imports more than US$5 billion in food each year, while its food import bill keeps growing.
There is, therefore, an urgent need to grow more of our own food while encouraging the acceptance of farming as a livelihood to meet that need.
A film competition sponsored by the CWA showed how growing more food could also be more profitable when value-added features were introduced into food production. The film competition focused on the theme: "Adding value to Local Foods" and was won by a team of two young men from St Lucia, who developed a fictional story to show how value added to coconuts could benefit the whole community.
Other films included the animated video, Captain V, about a superhero potato who encourages his fellow veggies by showing them ways they can make themselves more attractive to consumers through value-added features ranging from packaging to specialty products.
The young winners from both the Hackathon and the film competition expressed an awakened interest in agriculture and its potential to offer attractive careers, having been exposed to the material gathered in their research for the competitions.
That clearly is the hope of the CWA organisers: that young people will see farming as more than ploughing and backbreaking labour under the sun. However, a reality check is in order. Apps and cleverly-executed films will not grow food from the soil or rear meat for eating. The hands-on work required of farming will continue to be a necessary part of the business.
However, realistically, Hailu in his opening speech also mentioned knowledge management, nutrition-sensitive agriculture, and climate smart agriculture, as important to profitable and sustainable farming. That means technology must work along with everyday farming activity to secure a sustainable food supply for the region.
This recognition that it is not ICT alone or toil alone that will make our region sustainable in food is a move in the right direction, and young people should be encouraged to view farming holistically as a career that holds both glamour and the plain hard work on which everything truly worthwhile depends.
Jewel Fraser