By Dr Antonio Carmona Báez
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the spread of the novel coronavirus and its subsequent disease COVID-19 a pandemic; meaning that it is highly contagious, affecting all countries and societies globally. Within days countries came under lockdown, schools were closed and much of the economic activity requiring the physical appearance of clients came to a complete halt.
For those countries where tourism is the main source of income, we saw the instant disappearance of formal and informal jobs due to the empty cruise ship docks and the closing of airports. St. Martin has not been the exception, as tens of thousands of workers have been challenged in their employment conditions, businesses have been faced with loss of revenue and larger segments of the population had to depend on food donations and charities originally destined to those still affected by the impact of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.
But then, something beautiful happened. Forced to stay at home and not being able to access the supermarket on a daily basis, many St. Martiner’s started to grow their own food in whatever space available in their immediate environment. Kitchen gardens started popping up all over Soualiga, in both humble neighborhoods as well as in middle-class gated communities. This became more evident as social media outlets were flooded with pictures, stories and calls for advice residents posed to their neighbors.
Instagram became a local hub for food-porn, where St. Martiner’s proudly displayed their self-grown leafy greens on sandwiches, salads and soups.
On Facebook, new local pages were dedicated to the communities of home-growers: Kitchen Garden Group (31 March), Backyard Garden Club (28 April) and of course Home-Growers of SXM -which was established back in 2013 but experienced a boom in activity during the first month of lockdown. As the island’s promoters of agriculture were slowly allowed to move around the island to make deliveries, the rush for boxes, soil and natural pesticides (neem oil) became the order of the day. In the middle of mayhem and global fear, we witnessed what perhaps Bob Marley would refer to as “A natural mystic blowing through the air”.
However, the pandemic-forced opportunity for St. Martin’s turn to home-growing was anything but spontaneous. For years members of the community have made great efforts to include agriculture in school curricula, promote agriculture in governmental policies and have an organized self-reliant network of farmers who would share traditional and contemporary knowledge-practices upon which the Natural Mystic April, a rise of consciousness, was made possible. Building your own kitchen garden requires individual determination but a sense of community and purpose is necessary to make the experience worthwhile. Growing your micro-greens at home and planting fruit trees in the backyard can be fun, yes. But it all relies on years of education, practice and research. If the growing trend is to succeed after lockdown, we need to keep those ties and tend to those networks which promote a societal transformation towards sustainability. Hopefully, the trend can become a collective lifestyle which responds to our new reality.
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