We have come one full year since PNG’s first COVID 19 case was identified in a mine in Morobe in March last year. There is more work that needs to be done to keep the pandemic at bay.

The COVID 19 pandemic is a wonderful wake up call for us to self-assess ourselves as individuals and as a nation, Papua New Guinea.

Many of us bought the conspiracy theories or alternative perspectives on COVID 19 that are out there. We spent our precious minutes, hours and days talking about the conspiracy theories or alternative perspectives. They sounded genuine. Some of us took the science and health message behind COVID 19 seriously.

Still many millions more are lost into the middle and just getting on with life.

One fact about COVID 19 is that it brings discipline, self-respective and order into someone’s life.

It makes you to discipline yourself to follow the basic health and safety protocols. COVID 19 allows us to respect one another and try to be orderly in the manner we carry on with life.

One of the greatest benefits of COVID 19 pandemic is that people are now going for more organic garden foods and seafood to lead healthy lives and or fight of COVID 19. In Papua New Guinea, we are blessed with an abundance of organically grown garden food and seafood from our seas.

This pandemic gives us the opportunity to create and strengthen an organic local garden food and seafood based economy. I can foresee organic food based economies taking off along all our key roads leading out of towns and cities and into the rural areas. It is time for the local level governments along those road corridors to be empowered to mobilise their people to come out and sell the garden produce at designated roadside markets.

Under the present lock-down restrictions, the government must allow families from villages to set up garden food markets along the highways and roads in and out of town. Families from towns with private vehicles can drive out to these village roadside markets to buy their daily or weekly supply of organically grown garden good. Employers can also arrange company transport for their staff to go out to these roadside markets to buy the garden food.

The same goes to coastal villages who are into office. All them to bring in their catch to the roadside markets and people from the towns and within the rural communities can go and by the fish and other marine products.

I know for the fact that village farmers, especially women and older men, will feel very relieved that they are allowed to sell their produce at the roadside markets closer to their villagers. Often they struggle to get on PMV trucks to the markets in town only to spend less time selling and then they have to rush to get back on the PMVs to go home.

Retail businesses and hotels can also send their vehicles to the roadside markets out of town to buy their supplies of fresh garden food. The same also goes for those into catering for major educational institutions. Big universities like the University of PNG in Port Moresby and PNG University of Technology in Lae spend so much money on food through the catering firms they have contract with.

Those catering firms should be encouraged to go to the rural areas and buy the organic garden food that are out there in the rural roadside markets.

Let me point out that the roadside markets out of towns and cities are our life saving food bowls. We must nurture them and make them exist and grow.

During the various lockdown last year, I noticed the governor of central province Hon. Robert Agarobe was mobilizing his people to bring garden foods along certain points on the four main highways leading out of Port Moresby to his Central Province. That was well done. Governor Agarobe and his team should start this again supply nice organic garden food to the big city of Port Moresby.

The leaders in Morobe also need to do the same to encourage people to come at sell along the roadside leading into Lae city. The same goes for leaders with major towns and citizens that can benefit from the roadside markets.

When people in the villages see money coming right into their doorsteps in the villages, they will be encouraged to work hard and grow more food in the gardens.

We often complain about cheap packaged foods from Asia are flooding shop selves and potentially posing as a threat to our health. Well, COVID 19 has given us the opportunity to go organic and get food straight from our land courtesy of our wonderful village farmers. Let us work this, make it work and encourage the growth of a local economy based on organically grown food sold at the village roadside markets/