Last week I discussed about the great opportunities COVID 19 presents for us to invest in and support the organic food industry.

This is largely an untapped gold mine. The logic behind my suggestion is simple: you eat an abundance of organic food from our gardens daily and boost your immune system and you are on your way to defend yourselves from falling sick. Doctors and other health professionals tell us this all the time – to eat healthy garden food to stay healthy. Yet, so many of us go for the easily available packaged food from the shops and the takeaway food from ‘kaibars’ and street cooked food vendors out there.

They say, “you are what you eat”. Well, if you eat a lot of organic garden food and eat right, chances are you will assist your body to build up immunity to an extent where your body will defend itself from any ailment.

In my discussion last week, I pointed out that focus on organic food would encourage village people along our roads leading into our towns and cities to grow more of these foods. It is basic economics: when people in the villages along the roads see townsfolk drive up to their localities and buy garden food frequently, they will see the market for their garden produce and continue to plant more and suddenly you have created a local cash economy. For the people in the villages, it would also be healthy for them to do more gardening and stay physically fit and be healthy.

At this point in time, there is so much focus on the appearance and presence of COVID 19 in our different communities in the towns and provinces. Authorities seem to focus on the number of people getting infected and how these identified people are being put through the processes of isolation and or treatment.

There are different cadre of healthcare providers expressing concern about the hospitals and health clinics in the National Capital District running out of capacity to deal with the number positive COVID 19 cases coming through their facilities. Didn’t they anticipate this and what were the strategies they put in place to avoid such a situation? How often did they communicate with government authorities right up to the Controller of the Pandemic and the Prime Minister? How often did they appeal to the top authorities to come up with strategies to prevent the situation they are facing now with the difficulty to cope with the COVID 19 numbers coming through their hospitals and clinics?

How much effort was put in place for awareness against COVID 19 in NCD and nationwide? How often did such messaging target key vulnerable and or focused population groups? Did the messaging include nutrition intake and exercise or working in the gardens and so forth?

Mothers from the settlements and even suburbs of Port Moresby do a lot of gardening on the barren grassy hill sides? They then supply city markets with the organic foods they grow on those barren grassy hill country. How many of the communication consultants contracted by the government have taken cue from this and put together the COVID 19 awareness messaging encouraging people to engage in gardening in whatever space available to them?

Gardening in the backyard and in the barren blocks of hillside land in Port Moresby is just right, healthy and economical thing to do for mothers and even to supplement the organic food intake of the family and sell the surplus at the city markets. The same goes for other cities and towns nationwide.

Have the government’s COVID 19 communication consultants also considered putting together communication programs to create awareness among the village peoples outside of the towns and cities to go into increased farming of organic food as a way of making money and combatting the pandemic like I described last week?

Officially we say about 80 percent of our people lead subsistence lives and live in the villages in the rural areas outside of the towns and cities. We also say 97 per cent of land in Papua New Guinea is customarily owned – the 80 per cent of the people in the village own these lands.

When that is case, how do we convert this intapped resource into a powerful economic resource during this time of the pandemic? Could the government have done better by going to the villages to educate and inform the people about gardening and producing organic foods in large quantities for own consumption and selling surpluses at roadside markets or at the town markets and shops?

I offer here that the government has missed a golden opportunity to educate and inform or people about organic garden food production and come up with a system of transporting and marketing the produce on behalf of the people.

This is an untapped ‘gold mine’ that needs to looked at as we trying to come to terms with the increase in COVID 19 cases and the pressures it is exerting on our ailing health system.

Get the people to work the land and produce surplus healthy organics food. The government should go on a massive public education and awareness drive to inform our people go into backyard gardening and gardening on the lands that 80 per cent of our people in the villages of the rural areas are custodians of and make them productive.

The government should talk up the health benefits of gardening as a form of physically exercise to stay healthy and keep diseases like COVID 19 at bay. Talk up the fact that when someone is gardening he or she is away from crowds and is breathing fresh air and staying physically fit thus avoiding the contraction of COVID 19.

Once someone is away in the gardens, he or she is as safe as possible from the crowds that may spread communicable diseases.

The government should also talk up the nutritional gains of organic food production in the backyard and in the abundant lands in the villages. It can also talk up and communicate to the people the economic gains of organic garden food farming.

The government should then come up with a system to assist families to go into farming and bring their produce out to the roadside markets or put in place a buying, storage and supply system. Remember, our health system, is ailing one as experts have stated recently. It cannot cope with the sheer numbers of COVID 19 patients coming through to get assistance. Information is power: get the people to go into organic food production and create a system where people are engaged and avoid crowds but stay away and keep healthy gardening and eat healthy from the gardens.