IKAW Founder: National composting strategy key to reducing T&T’s food import bill

A ma­jor push to re­duce food waste could sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er Trinidad and To­ba­go’s food im­port bill and bol­ster na­tion­al self-sus­tain­abil­i­ty, ac­cord­ing to Louisea John-Browne, founder of In­crease Kids Agro World (IKAW).

As geopo­lit­i­cal con­cerns re­fo­cus at­ten­tion on re­gion­al food se­cu­ri­ty, John-Browne and her team are aim­ing to ex­pand their ef­forts to com­bat food waste across T&T and the wider Caribbean.

In the com­ing weeks, she will bring strate­gies learned in the Unit­ed States to class­rooms in South Trinidad to com­mem­o­rate In­ter­na­tion­al Com­post Aware­ness Week.

IKAW has cam­paigned to re­duce food waste in T&T for five years and re­cent­ly joined the US Com­post­ing Coun­cil.

“We at­tend­ed a com­post­ing con­fer­ence in Feb­ru­ary in the US and the large vol­ume of pro­duc­tion and op­er­a­tions that we saw across there is a vi­sion would like to have lo­cal­ly in Trinidad, and that will, know, af­ford us the abil­i­ty to ex­port re­gion­al­ly, so that we can have re­gion­al farm­ers on board with us­ing or­gan­ic fer­til­iz­ers,” said John-Browne in a phone in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian on Mon­day.

Last week, Pro­fes­sor Wayne Gan­pat warned the Busi­ness Guardian that the Caribbean could face a sharp in­crease in food prices with­in three months, sug­gest­ing a po­ten­tial food cri­sis.

“We are faced with the four Fs. Fu­el in­creas­es, which is go­ing to im­pact food for hu­mans, feed for live­stock, and fer­tilis­ers in a big way as a key com­po­nent of agri­cul­ture,” Gan­pat stat­ed.

John-Browne be­lieves IKAW can ad­dress the fi­nal “F” through an up­com­ing ed­u­ca­tion dri­ve de­signed to en­cour­age waste re­duc­tion strate­gies. She not­ed that the lat­ter part of the equa­tion is “vi­tal­ly im­por­tant.”

“Our slo­gan is com­post to­day, ze­ro food waste to­mor­row. So we fo­cus a lot on food waste re­duc­tion that could very well im­pact the food im­port bill. We teach kids one to re­duce food waste, and then we teach them,” she ex­plained, “Where the same food that is wast­ed is con­vert­ed in­to a fer­tilis­er that we can use in our gar­dens to gen­er­ate, or to cre­ate, or to grow plants. So we’re talk­ing now self-sus­tain­abil­i­ty.”

Her stance is sup­port­ed by her or­gan­i­sa­tion’s growth over the past year, which she us­es to ad­vo­cate for the de­vel­op­ment of what she calls “Black Gold.”

“We can sus­tain our­selves, in­di­vid­u­als, fam­i­lies and a na­tion by us­ing the same food that is wast­ed to cre­ate the fer­tilis­er to again gen­er­ate food, our own food. So it can very well im­pact the food im­port bill over time, that is so we saw the need to teach kids the val­ue of re­duc­ing food waste and cre­at­ing ‘Black gold’. With a hope that in years to come, once the knowl­edge is giv­en now that the bill would be re­duced, it will be a self-sus­tained na­tion,” the IKAW founder said.

John-Browne not­ed that in­creased aware­ness has di­rect­ly trans­lat­ed in­to high­er de­mand.

“I think it’s been about a year now that we have grown. Our sales have grown. We were able to ed­u­cate a wider cross-sec­tion of not on­ly kids, but the pop­u­la­tion, do­ing var­i­ous train­ing pro­grams through­out the coun­try. And be­cause of the ed­u­ca­tion that we were do­ing and the aware­ness that we were bring­ing to peo­ple, the sales went up so per­sons were now see­ing the need for the use of the com­post, from home gar­den­ers to large-scale, large-scale farm­ers.”

She added that in­ter­est has even ex­tend­ed to Grena­da, though those spe­cif­ic plans are still ma­tur­ing.

“We have had a cou­ple of farm­ers in Grena­da reach out to us for the com­post and al­so for one of the cours­es that we were of­fer­ing. How­ev­er, that kind of fell through the cracks, but we did have that re­gion­al in­ter­est and our hope is that we will reach that re­gion­al lev­el,” John-Browne said.

“One, with the con­nec­tions that we have to the US Com­post­ing Coun­cil, and al­so through our con­nec­tions re­gion­al­ly, as we have some com­posters in the Ba­hamas and al­so a cou­ple oth­er small is­lands that we have been con­nect­ing with to car­ry the work a lit­tle fur­ther.”

Be­yond her busi­ness suc­cess, she is urg­ing oth­er com­pa­nies to adopt or­gan­ic fer­tilis­ers on a na­tion­al scale.

“If per­sons or busi­ness­es or even the coun­try have a de­sire to re­duce food waste and then to use nat­ur­al fer­tilis­ers, I think that is where it starts. And then, hav­ing these, af­ter hav­ing de­sire, you would need to have a plan.

“How you in­tend on, from our ex­pe­ri­ence, col­lect­ing the food waste and con­vert­ing it,” she said, “Our even­tu­al end goal, which is on a na­tion­al lev­el, is to have an au­to­mat­ed fa­cil­i­ty where all, or a large per­cent, if not all, of the food waste that is gen­er­at­ed in the na­tion is col­lect­ed at our fa­cil­i­ty and au­to­mat­i­cal­ly con­vert­ed in­to or­gan­ic fer­til­iz­er that our said farm­ers can use and that we can ex­port re­gion­al­ly as well. So that is our end goal, that is on a na­tion­al lev­el.”

She ob­served that many re­gion­al com­posters fo­cus pri­mar­i­ly on fer­tilis­er pro­duc­tion rather than waste re­duc­tion.

“What we have re­alised in do­ing so is that a lot of the oth­er com­posters are not fo­cus­ing on achiev­ing ze­ro food waste on­ly. That is our goal; they are most­ly do­ing the com­post­ing for fer­tilis­er, fer­til­i­sa­tion pur­pos­es. But our end goal is to achieve, if not ze­ro food waste, but the con­cept of it grow­ing in one: our chil­dren’s minds, and two: the pop­u­la­tion, to ad­dress the is­sue of food wastage,” John-Browne said, “So that’s why we com­post. But re­gion­al­ly, that’s not the end goal. But we have seen com­post­ing, mak­ing up a lit­tle bit of a stride in the Caribbean. We in­tend on tak­ing it fur­ther.”

Fol­low­ing last year’s cam­paign tar­get­ing cor­po­rate T&T, John-Browne con­firmed that this year’s ini­tia­tive will fo­cus on three pri­ma­ry schools and one sec­ondary school in San Fer­nan­do.