Worldwide there is a concerted effort to push small farmers off their land! This type of action is taking place in spite of the fact that more than half of the world' 6 billion people keep body and soul together through their own efforts to produce the food necessary to feed the whole world. Yet, strong forces are hard at work to force the small farmer, the peasant, the tiller of the soil to abandon their lands.
The reasoning behind such moves is not hard to find. Large, industrialized and urban populations think that the best way to produce food is through the corporate farm structure. Obviously, these huge, agricultural industries produce vast amounts of food, vegetables, fruit, grain, etc. but at serious, expensive and climate-changing costs. Their production methods include absorbing tremendous amounts of water, using serious amounts of chemicals and they have an insatiable thirst for ever scarce fossil fuels. To insure that these serious and mounting investment costs are repaid and repaid at great profit, people across the globe must be forced to buy, certainly not
produce, their own food. Having small farmers who currently feed the majority of people across the world doesn't fit well in with the need for corporate profit.
Our own small farmers on the other hand can not be faulted in the overuse of precious fresh water. The rains alone are the only water they use. Because chemicals and fertilizers are so costly our gardeners hardly make use of them in their food production techniques. Our women gardeners rarely, if ever, depend upon fossil fuel consumption--petrol, kerosene, diesel--to
produce a healthy harvest of organic food.
Our nation's 'Bottom Up' approach--raising the quality of village living--directly fights this modern-day movement. The present government's accent on rural development is not simply an add on to everything else that a government does but the village focus lies at the very core of what it intends to follow for the next three years. Fortunately, our efforts to travel this direction are attracting other like-minded nations. Some of these lie on the other side of the globe and sincerely applaud what they see is going on here in Solomon Islands.
India, for instance, with its 1/2 a million (yes, half a million) villages--as many villages as we have people--is naturally attracted to other nations wedded to the idea of strengthening the lives of village people. When the newly appointed India's High Commissioner, Mr. Satya Mann,
presented his credentials to our Governor General and Prime Minister last week, he went out of his way to promise India's help to our small farmers.
During his formal talks with the PM, Mr. Mann was already promising to send specialists in rural farming to visit our people. He also asked for dedicated teams from our own country to officially visit his country to study how India responded to the needs of the back bone of Indian food
production, its village people. He was particularly outspoken in assuring us that our 'Bottom Up' approach was the wave of the 21st Century.
That is why India's promises to assist our food producers to become more efficient, more connected with the market and more self-reliant is welcome news to government's efforts to reach out to our village population.
But in this very same arena of international assistance, Taiwan, Cuba, Venezuela and Iceland are also singing from the same page as the Solomons. Recently, for instance, Taiwanese food experts traveled to the Solomons to show our farmers the worth of value added products to raise their income levels.
We are all aware of how many pineapples, mangoes and bananas land in our market during the November-February months each year. December, as we know, is our pineapple and mango period. Honiara's Main Market at that time is overloaded with these fruits. We truly have a glut of a good thing. Taiwan's experts, however, demonstrated how the typical farmer, especially the youth of a village, could begin to line their pockets with impressive amounts of money by preserving these fruits, making jams and jellies and drying these delicious fruits for package sales in stores around the country.
But government efforts don't stop there. It currently makes available $10 million in soft loans for farmers to begin small income generating projects focusing on adding value to the crops that the farmers already produce.
Isabel currently markets coffee, Western Province cans tuna, some provinces are eyeing vanilla production and still others are testing out the making of fruit jams and jellies. The Government's $10 million dollar soft loan offer is only a warm up. If local production takes off, then serious amounts of money will be made available. Our Melanesian Spearhead Group, also would
more than welcome these value-added products. These are different ways of helping our farmers, not failing them!
J. Roughan
2 April 2007
Honiara
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