Agriculture Minister promises support for schools local food program

The Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, Forestry, Fisheries and Biodiversity(MALFF&B), Matai Seremiah, has promised his Ministry’s support to any school in the country that wished to plant local food crops for the school menu.

He assured the schools that the Ministry of Agriculture would always be ready to provide support to the Ministry of Education for any program that schools wanted to carry out to promote local food.

“If a school has a piece of land it wishes to utilizes, the Ministry of Agriculture can make available staff to assist the school grow local food for consumption by the school,” he promised.

Minister Seremiah gave the undertaking during his speech at Lycee de Luganville during the celebration of the school’s diamond jubilee last Friday.

“It’s an honor to be invited to come to this occasion as MP for Luganville on which this institution is situated,” he stated, adding that before becoming a Member of Parliament he was already supporting the college.

“One of the big challenges Vanuatu faces today is the issue of non-communicable diseases (NCD) which the Ministry of Health is spearheading the fight against,” the Minister of ALFF&B continued.

Just recently a survey was conducted throughout Vanuatu by the Ministry of Agriculture, funded by the New Zealand government, which found that 70% of the children of the country were malnourished.

“This means that the children are not eating enough healthy foods,” Minister Seremiah added. “And when they presented this report to me they said to me that when they conducted the survey in the Banks Group they found that the child of one of my staff in the Ministry of Agriculture was malnourished,” he said, “which meant he was feeding his child with more tinned food that the local foods,” he claimed.

The minister emphasized that when the children were malnourished they could not learn to the capacity of their maximum ability and this was a challenge that must be tackled now because “if not the Ministry of Health must find more money to treat NDC cases”.

This brings our attention to this issue back to the schools to focus on how we feed our children and how we train them also to know what is healthy food, he adds.