Vincentians are being encouraged to continue growing their own food and embracing the “eat what you grow” philosophy, as part of the ongoing push to strengthen national food security.

This encouragement was made by Director and CEO of the Zero Hunger Trust Fund, Safiya Horne-Bique.

She was speaking to the Agency for Public Information the API, at the Dumbarton Agricultural Station in Mesopotamia on Friday, August 15th, where one of the largest poultry distributions to date took place, including approximately 20,000 broiler chicks, 5,000 layers, and 5,000 turkeys.

Horne-Bique noted a strong turnout and explained that initiatives like this, led in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, are critical to building resilience and ensuring food self-sufficiency across Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

"Today, for the first time we are distributing turkeys. We started the Food Security Drive Poultry Program last year and we started distributing about January this year, so this is one of our bigger distribution where we have about twenty thousand (20, 000) broilers coming in, five thousand (5,000) Layers, five thousand (5,000) Turkeys. We had a call for persons to register and we put out for persons to come in and collect their Turkeys today, so this is what were doing right now. As you see we have quite a few people interested and we are trying to move them out as quickly as possible and we are encouraging persons to continue to grow their own food, eat what they grow, and this is part of that program that we have been running for the year now."

SOURCE: National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC Radio)