Nationals need to work the soil says Taiwanese Ambassador

By VonDez Phipps
Reporter-SKNVibes.com

Resident Ambassador Ron Chuan Wu

During an interview with SKNVibes yesterday (Nov. 24) Ambassador Wu stated that his government wants to partner with the government and people of St. Kitts-Nevis to provide assistance to ensure that the country achieves sustainable agricultural development. He added that now is the most opportune moment to cooperate with the government to reach a state of self-sufficiency with regard agriculture.

“We must bear in mind that the country imports about 60-70 per cent of its agricultural products. 

This kind of import is unjustified because the country has very fertile land and so there is no reason to import such a large quantity of agricultural products. Preferably, we can begin to export our strong items in exchange for our weak ones so as to make our agricultural products balanced,” Wu said.

The Ambassador outlined three major elements that comprise the “backbone of agriculture”:- agricultural infrastructure, labour force and marketing mechanism. 

He highlighted the need for proper agricultural infrastructure to support the growing sector and focussed on the need to have proper irrigation and water storage in particular. Wu indicated that during the rainy season, a large amount of produce is yielded but very little is yielded during the dry season. He urged all farmers to collect water during the rainy season in order to support cultivation during the dry season.    ~~Adz:Right~~

“Also, we realize that a lot of young people are afraid to go into agriculture because they are afraid of doing manual work, but we have to encourage more young people to devote themselves to agriculture. Most of you [locals] were educated to get a PhD and to go abroad to get your degrees; you were not encouraged to work in agriculture. We believe that we don’t have to encourage all the students to pursue degrees in medicine or law, as important as they are; we need to train some to be farmers.

“We are going to cooperate with your government in this regard, through our scholarship programmes in which we provide US $100,000 per year, under our Human Resources Programmes, in order to divert some of the resources to encourage young persons to get into agriculture.”

Ambassador Wu stressed that it is of no use to produce a large amount of agricultural provisions without a strong marketing mechanism to export to regional and international markets.

“Taiwan will remain devoted to developing the country’s agricultural sector and in the near future, my government is expecting to establish a collective machinery unit to facilitate young farmers in developing this area of paramount importance,” the Ambassador assured.