Food for thought on World Food Day

World Food Day is commemorated annually on October 16 and highlights the plight of millions of undernourished people around the world who mostly live in rural areas where their main source of income is agriculture. Global warming is now threatening to push the number of hungry people even higher.

This day is also meant to increase the awareness on financing and economically aiding the agricultural industry.?Our rapidly increasing population growth places significant importance on increasing agricultural yields. To this end, EDS has been involved in various SMME Development Programmes to bring relief to disadvantaged rural communities.

One of these was the Honeybee Project which was conducted in two phases.?

Phase 1 was general business training and upskilling and Phase 2 was practical mentorship and business enhancement.?

The selected beneficiary was a commercial trust trading as an un-incorporated co-operative comprising mainly women. It had the potential to become a viable, sustainable entity as the community members working there had done so for several years and achieved some commercial gains.

At the start of the programme, the project was farming eight beehives. This was increased to 100 during the programme for the co-operative to be sustainable and produce enough honey to sell.

For industry-specific training,?participants attended a Beginners Beekeeping course to equip them with the required elementary skills. They were awarded certificates of competency after completing the training.?

The consistent production and supply of honey was key to the project’s sustainability. To achieve this, participants had to ensure that there was enough food for them to produce honey. This resulted in the establishment of a vegetable and flower garden.

The aim of the garden was to provide food for the bees, to optimise honey production, and an income to the Honeybee Project as the harvest would be sold to the surrounding community.?

Although they are small in size, bees play a key role in our lives – in fact, life on Earth as we know it would not exist without them. This is why the decline in bee populations around the world over the past century is worrying.

Bees risk becoming extinct largely due to human activities such as large-scale changes in land use, industrialised agricultural practices and the use of pesticides. These have contributed to destroying their habitats and reducing their available food sources.??

Globalisation has led to the transmission of parasites and other invasive species that prey on bees. Global warming also plays a large role – rising temperatures, increased floods and droughts that cause changes in the blooming seasons of flowering plants affect the bees’ ecosystems.

Bees are one of the world’s most efficient and prolific pollinators. They spread pollen from flower to flower and help plants to reproduce. But they pollinate more than flowers, many of our favourite fruits and vegetables require bees to pollinate them. Bees are critical for the stability of our food systems, they support more than 35% of global agricultural systems, so their disappearance could result in a food crisis for humanity.?

On World Food Day, we will do well to remember that we must actively protect bee populations to help us meet the food demand of the world’s growing population.?

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