Someone whose opinion I appreciate recently convinced me that I should take a fresh look at a national school feeding programme with the awareness of its potential to organise specific farmers and fishermen, unemployed youth, professional chefs and even delinquent fathers. The idea is that these people would be organised by the Ministry of Education with other departments in government to produce vegetables, food crops, eggs, milk and fish in a project to commence possibly as early as 2020.
The programme should begin with a pilot project in at least four schools in which the need is greatest. The choice of schools should be a matter of wide inter-ministerial discussion.
The Ministry of Education should then consult the department of agriculture in selecting competent and willing farmers and inland fishermen in close proximity to the selected schools, to produce and sell directly to each of these schools on a scheduled basis. Inland fishermen and regular fishers would be engaged to supply weekly quantities of fish to the programme.
The Ministry of Education ought also to consult and engage local chefs with the intention of attaching one to each school to help prepare nutritious meals for targeted students. The programme is aimed broadly at preparing nutritious foods and juices and shakes to boost the nutrition of selected underfed students. Willing unemployed youth ought to be engaged in helping sort out, prepare, and feed the targeted children at a time determined by the teachers and the Ministry of Education.
Fathers who have been taken before the courts for child maintenance ought to be engaged with those selected farmers and fishermen in producing fish and food for this programme. It matters not whether their neglected child attends a school in the pilot project. The courts should be able to assist in directing such fathers.
During school vacation, negligent fathers and unemployed youth, along with the selected chefs, will continue to produce at least one meal a day for children whose parents sign up for the feeding programme at that time. It is suggested that children who are fed at the school during vacation should be engaged for at least two hours each day in reading, computer literacy and Math classes.
Unemployed mothers of these children should be encouraged to give time and expertise to work and assist in whatever way they can in the school feeding and vacation training programmes.
In the meantime, the million dollar question remains: What is the long-term solution for parents and guardians who cannot properly feed their children and furnish them with school supplies?
For how long should responsible taxpaying people contribute to a school feeding programme?
And should family-life education be compulsory for men and women lacking the means to properly decide on their family size, and to feed and educate their children?
In addition to seeking foreign direct investment in the economy, such a school feeding programme will signal to the world that Saint Lucia has embarked on a new path to social and economic development, thinking outside the proverbial box and finding new ways to feed and educate all her children.
It is a new path to freedom from hunger which one hopes will gain support among politicians and business people, and the nation at large.
Who can fault a programme that encourages organised food production in order to feed children in need? What is needed is the political will?
Local food production for such a project may prove difficult for those who love the glamour and bright lights associated with the more popular aspects of social and economic development.
Indeed, organising specific farm production to feed our needy children, creating new inland fishermen, engaging unemployed youth and selected local chefs plus the employment of delinquent, hard-pressed fathers, is a project too far-reaching in its implication for social and economic development to be rejected by imaginative political thinkers and leaders.
It’s another aspect of social and economic development that needs to be undertaken by those who claim to love the children of this fair land.
