June 9th, 2016 -- A team from the Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College (CFBC) will be heading to Barbados this weekend for a week to implement the third installment of an OAS-funded hydroponics project known as The Provisions Project. The Project Team Leader Dr. Leighton Naraine and Project Technical Expert Stuart LaPLace both from the CFBC will be heading to Barbados to implement the project which will involve training persons from community based groups on developing the hydroponics model created by the CFBC. They will be joined by Dr. Kevin Meehan, English Professor at University of Central Florida and Director of Haitian Studies Project, who will be the documentation specialist on this trip.
The Provisions Project is a concept developed at the CFBC and has been tried and proven successfully for about eight years. The CFBC is the executing agency that will replicate the hydroponics model it created in five Caribbean countries as a pilot and transfer of knowledge from the CFBC to these countries, namely Guyana, Nevis, Barbados, Trinidad and Haiti. The CFBC applied for funding and was chosen from among several other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The first implementation site was Guyana, in 2015 followed by Nevis in April this year. Hydroponics is a water-based agriculture system that uses less soil and water to grow crops in a more efficient fashion than traditional forms of agriculture.
Dr. Naraine said the agency selected in Barbados for this implementation is the Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic. “They (Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic) will have the replication of this system but they will have five other groups coming in for training…they will have more community based organizations rather than various schools but because they will be bringing coordinators from these various organizations and they will have a number of staff members at the Samuel Jackman Polytechnic who will receive the training, they plan to replicate that and duplicate it to other places,” Dr. Naraine explained. He added that there will be an opening ceremony on Monday June 13 featuring the minister of education, the permanent secretary in the ministry of agriculture among other officials. He expects that the trip will be successful.
Mr. LaPLace, who is also a lecturer at the CFBC, explained that participants in Barbados will be taught how hydroponics work and some of the principles behind hydroponics. “We will show them how hydroponics works at a more low-tech design where we’re going to have demonstrations done with a model that we built specifically for the training and hopefully we will showcase some of the principles behind hydroponics farming and appeal to some of the young persons who would have been affected diversely from the effects of climate change,” Mr. Laplace said.
Dr. Meehan explained that his role in the trip to Barbados is to capture digital video to be used for mainly for documentation, training and promotional purposes. “We want to capture some educational aspects of the project and develop some educational materials that can be used not only formally in the schools…but also non-formally to reach everyday people,” Dr. Meehan said. He said short YouTube tutorials will be created that will focus on every aspect of The Provisions Project.
Meanwhile, the OAS representative for St. Kitts and Nevis Terrence Craig lauded the CFBC and the team heading to Barbados and said the OAS was happy to have funded this project, designed to enhance research and education in the area of mitigating the effects of climate change as it relates to agriculture.
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