We have com­plet­ed the first six months of liv­ing un­der the new re­stric­tions im­posed to deal with the Pan­dem­ic.

Dur­ing that time we some­how suc­cess­ful­ly staged a gen­er­al elec­tion, which went off pret­ty smooth­ly de­spite some ob­vi­ous flout­ing of COVID-19 reg­u­la­tions across the board.

The PNM were re­turned to pow­er, where they face the mon­u­men­tal task of try­ing to in­crease rev­enue and sat­is­fy the grow­ing needs of a large­ly strug­gling pop­u­la­tion, with very few op­tions to do ei­ther.

So, I would like to sug­gest that the next five years will be the most cru­cial in our young na­tion’s his­to­ry and we should all work as dili­gent­ly as we can to sup­port our na­tion­al well be­ing in every man­ner pos­si­ble.

In this re­gard, I have al­ready be­gan plant­i­ng as many fruit trees as can fit in my back­yard and plan to start my mar­ket gar­den soon.

I would al­so like to sug­gest to the Gov­ern­ment that as part of their new pro­posed thrust in agri­cul­ture, they make all fruit trees, bread­fruit trees, toma­to, let­tuce, cab­bage and all oth­er veg­etable plants and seeds eas­i­ly and in­ex­pen­sive­ly avail­able to all cit­i­zens in every lo­cale.

In ad­di­tion, the Agri­cul­ture Min­istry must al­so come up with ef­fec­tive com­mu­ni­ty pro­grammes to ed­u­cate us all on the best way to suc­cess­ful­ly grow our fruits and veg­eta­bles.

Of course, WASA has to play their part too in en­sur­ing an ad­e­quate wa­ter sup­ply.

Hope­ful­ly, most of us will agree that as a mat­ter of na­tion­al ur­gency and even of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, we have to quick­ly make ma­jor cuts in our food im­port bill.

There is not a mo­ment to waste.

Gre­go­ry Wight

Mar­aval