A back­yard pump­kin planter from Princes Town needs sci­en­tif­ic and prac­ticed at­ten­tion to be paid to his ex­per­i­ment in food crop farm­ing. It is not every day that any­one, kitchen gar­den­er, sci­en­tif­ic agri­cul­tur­al­ist and/or reg­u­lar grow­er of food, pro­duces a 600-pound pump­kin.

As re­port­ed in yes­ter­day’s T&T Guardian, Sha­heed Ali, with sup­port from his wife Jas­min, not for the first time, has pro­duced a mas­sive pump­kin.

It is im­por­tant to note that the pump­kin is not ed­i­ble be­cause the ge­net­i­cal­ly al­tered seeds it was prop­a­gat­ed from do not al­low for this.

How­ev­er, such a sto­ry is im­por­tant enough to go be­yond the re­portage be­cause we live in a world in which agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion for con­sump­tion is be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly un­pre­dictable.

The par­tic­u­lar need in Trinidad and To­ba­go to­day is re­flect­ed in Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture da­ta which in­di­cates that be­tween 80-85 per cent of the food we con­sume is im­port­ed. Not too in­ci­den­tal­ly, that is the pat­tern set by the plan­ta­tion so­ci­ety.

That overde­pen­dence makes us vul­ner­a­ble be­cause of the va­garies of the world we live in: wars, food sup­ply trains dis­rupt­ed and the degra­da­tion of the qual­i­ty of processed food, which stays in cans and plas­tics for months. So, to un­der­stand the im­pact and con­se­quences of the an­nu­al $7 bil­lion food im­port bill is to agree with the need for an es­ca­la­tion in lo­cal food pro­duc­tion.

For in­stance, at­ten­tion has to be paid to the food im­port bill, which swal­lows des­per­ate­ly need­ed for­eign ex­change earned main­ly from the en­er­gy sec­tor. The dis­sua­sion of this gen­er­a­tion of farm­ers from mul­ti­ply­ing in a coun­try and re­gion which came in­to mod­ern ex­is­tence through agri­cul­ture and live­stock farm­ing, are all be­ing im­pact­ed by the con­tin­u­ing and grow­ing de­pen­dence on im­port­ed food.

The 600-pound pump­kin pro­duced by the home-gar­den farmer—and that is a term used not to min­imise in any way the kind of food pro­duc­er who grew away from plan­ta­tion agri­cul­ture for ex­port—is an in­di­ca­tion of what is pos­si­ble by small-scale gar­den­ers.

Home gar­den­er Ali, in grow­ing the mas­sive pump­kin, shared the ab­solute need for con­stant and plen­ti­ful fresh wa­ter to grow his crop. The fact is that “fresh wa­ter is be­com­ing one of the most crit­i­cal and scarce com­modi­ties in the world of to­day,” ac­cord­ing to the Unit­ed Na­tions. In­deed, the world “en­ters the era of glob­al bank­rupt­cy of wa­ter,” states the UN.

The sig­nif­i­cance of that re­al­i­ty to our de­pen­dence on im­port­ed food will be­come even more crit­i­cal, as it af­fects food sup­ply, prices, for­eign ex­change con­sump­tion and in­evitably the in­abil­i­ty of T&T to ac­quire im­port­ed food to feed our­selves.

The out­stand­ing point of the pro­duc­tion of this mas­sive pump­kin is that it gives an in­di­ca­tion as to what can be done if se­ri­ous, ex­per­i­men­tal and pro­duc­tive agri­cul­ture is giv­en the kind of at­ten­tion that is re­quired to move it up­ward from be­ing less than one per cent of GDP.

Imag­ine the cost to which im­port­ed food will rise when there are short­ages of wa­ter and the hor­ror of a world in which wars and con­flicts of every kind are con­sum­ing re­sources and block­ing sea pas­sages used to trans­port food.

Gov­ern­ment and Op­po­si­tion, as well as in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­ers of canned food, need to pay at­ten­tion to the po­ten­tial of the home­grown pump­kin farmer and al­so en­sure that, as a coun­try, we do as ca­lyp­son­ian Lord Shorty say and “Plant de Land.”