Corozal students observe World Food Day
As more and more Belizeans are diagnosed with heart disease, diabetes and other life threatening ailments, nutrition has become extremely important to our population. And as attention shifts to food and healthy diets, the issue of food security naturally arises. Today those topics were at the centre of discussion in Corozal. Janelle Chanona reports.
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
Today, hundreds of students from the Corozal and Orange Walk districts gathered on the campus of Escuela Secundaria Mexico in San Roman as part of World Food Day 2005 activities.
This year the theme of the event is: Agriculture and Intercultural Dialogue. According to coordinator of the National Food and Nutrition Commission in Belize, Melanio Pech, this year’s topic is crucial to the promotion of diversification of the country’s traditional agricultural base.
Melanio Pech, Coord., Natl. Food and Nutrition Commission
“Agriculture plays a major role. It is not just planting sugar cane, planting rice, planting vegetables, it is doing things different and we learn by communicating, by talking to each other. All of us have an idea of different things and by sharing information, then only so can we learn things and make things different.”
In the northern part of the country, the traditional crop has been sugar cane, but in the real world of disappearing preferential markets, farmers are feeling the pinch in their pockets. As part of today’s event, organisers pushed alternate crops such as fish farming for small-scale production, papaya and habanero crops, and most recently, mushroom cultivation.
Melanio Pech
“After so many years, agriculture prices are not the same as it used to be some ten, fifteen years ago. And thus the Agriculture Department is pushing as much as possible, emphasising the need for farmers to diversify, to go into commodities that are more productive, more efficient in production than sugar cane and that can be competitive enough so that farmers can have money in their pockets. It is not just to sell vegetables and corn as it used to be one time for sustainable reasons.”
As the clock got closer to lunchtime, it was clear the students, teachers, and parents were eager to diversify the flavour of their foods, sampling a wide-ranging menu that went from the conventional…to the unusual, like this vegetarian dish made up of nothing more than flour and spices.
Janelle Chanona
“Tastes like meat.”
And while some students filled their bellies, their peers were emptying their brains of tons of nutritional knowledge in the seventh annual A.D.M. Nutritional Quiz.
Quiz Master
“Which of the following would provide an individual with a high amount of iron? A) boil-up, B) sere, C) hudut lasouse, or D, steam calaloo and fish.”
Student
“D.”
Quiz Master
“You are correct.”
The students of the Belize Adventist College would go on to win the right to represent the Corozal District in the national competition, and hopefully mascot Nutripower will get some rest by then. Reporting for News Five, I am Janelle Chanona.
