The St. Vin­cent and the Grenadines gov­ern­ment says it has launched “Op­er­a­tion Home­grown” aimed at boost­ing the ca­pac­i­ty of lo­cal farm­ers and back­yard gar­den­ers to in­crease food pro­duc­tion.

Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Saboto Cae­sar said that with the im­port tar­iffs from the Unit­ed States, it is im­por­tant that there should be in­creas­es in the the pro­duc­tion of crops and poul­try to meet lo­cal de­mands.

“We are work­ing close­ly with the Ze­ro Hunger Trust and we are go­ing to in­ten­si­fy our work with the farm­ers’ sup­port com­pa­ny…in St. Vin­cent and the Grenadines,” Cae­sar said, not­ing “we are an im­porter of large quan­ti­ties of poul­try, we want to en­sure that over the com­ing weeks, months, years that we re­duce the im­por­ta­tion of poul­try an we in­crease pro­duc­tion”.

He said thou­sands of broil­ers and lay­ers have been dis­trib­uted through the Ze­ro Hunger Trust Fund, which has al­so dis­trib­uted seeds and seedlings coun­try­wide. In ad­di­tion, 35,000 day old chicks have been brought in­to the coun­try and are cur­rent­ly be­ing dis­trib­uted.

“The tar­get is not on­ly com­mer­cial farm­ers…we are work­ing with per­sons who may need 12, 24 or as low as six…and this will def­i­nite­ly have an im­pact on pro­duc­tion and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in the coun­try,” Cae­sar said.

He said the min­istry is al­so work­ing with com­mu­ni­ties giv­ing the nec­es­sary sup­port s that there could be a “col­lec­tive ap­proach to com­mu­ni­ty pro­duc­tion of poul­try”.

Cae­sar said Cab­i­net has ap­proved the im­por­ta­tion of 5,000 turkeys this week and that there will be a a na­tion­al an­nounce­ment en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to get in­volved in the na­tion­al turkey ex­pan­sion pro­gramme.