Geisha Kow­lessar

In a bid to en­sure T&T be­comes a food-se­cure na­tion and to fos­ter the ap­pre­ci­a­tion of lo­cal foods, the Gov­ern­ment yes­ter­day launched its cor­po­rate ad­ver­tis­ing cam­paign aimed at sen­si­tis­ing the pub­lic. The event, which took place at Kapok Ho­tel, St Clair, fea­tured snip­pets of the ben­e­fit of lo­cal fruits and veg­eta­bles.

Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj, who de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress, said the cam­paign cost un­der $1 mil­lion.And, in the first time in al­most a decade T&T will be ex­port­ing lo­cal crops this morn­ing to Bar­ba­dos."This means our farm­ers would have an ad­di­tion­al mar­ket apart from T&T," Ma­haraj added.

By grow­ing more lo­cal foods, Ma­haraj said, it ul­ti­mate­ly re­duces the coun­try's food im­port bill and af­fords more rev­enue to farm­ers.Urg­ing all stake­hold­ers to be holis­tic in their ap­proach to food pro­duc­tion, Ma­haraj said there were still chal­lenges in­clud­ing con­sumers pre­fer­ring im­port­ed and fast food.

"Eat­ing pat­terns and the taste of these con­sumers have shift­ed over the years. What we eat to­day is vast­ly dif­fer­ent from what our grand­par­ents pre­ferred."We are im­pact­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly from var­i­ous fran­chis­es from north Amer­i­ca," Ma­haraj said.

While the Gov­ern­ment had no ob­jec­tion to such mush­room­ing busi­ness­es, the min­is­ter called for a greater ap­pre­ci­a­tion of lo­cal prod­ucts."The pur­pose of this cam­paign was al­so to re­mind con­sumers of the great val­ue of our lo­cal foods."We be­lieve that sim­ply telling the con­sumers that eat­ing lo­cal is not enough to cap­ture their at­ten­tion, thus our cam­paign de­liv­ers a clear and un­am­bigu­ous mes­sage about the ben­e­fits of eat­ing lo­cal," he said.

Posters de­tail­ing the im­por­tance of lo­cal food will be dis­trib­uted to schools as part of the cam­paign­ing strat­e­gy. The cam­paign is ex­pect­ed to last a year and will use a va­ri­ety of me­dia in­clud­ing bill­boards and ra­dio ad­ver­tise­ments.A lo­cal cook­ing show us­ing on­ly lo­cal­ly-grown food is in the works, the spin-off of which is ex­pect­ed to be a cook­book de­tail­ing sole­ly lo­cal recipes.

Asked about the some­times ex­or­bi­tant prices of lo­cal veg­eta­bles, name­ly toma­toes, Ma­haraj at­trib­uted that to sev­er­al vari­ables in­clud­ing flood­ing and the high prices of pes­ti­cides.

On the is­sue of the mega farms, Ma­haraj said ef­forts are still be­ing made to ob­tain prop­er clear­ance from var­i­ous agen­cies."The mega farms, even though they have been al­lo­cat­ed the land, that is not the end of the sto­ry from the min­istry or the farmer.

"He has to get the re­quired ap­proval from the EMA (En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty), and WASA is al­so in­volved as well and these agen­cies have process­es that take a con­sid­er­able amount of time and that has de­layed the farmer get­ting his crops from off the ground," Ma­haraj said.He said he has held talks with the EMA and Gan­ga Singh, Min­is­ter of the En­vi­ron­ment and Wa­ter Re­sources, to fast-track the sit­u­a­tion.