THE plan by Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD) students, grouped under the Student Community Outreach Team (Scot), to give a helping hand to underprivileged farmers deserves applause because it is aimed at helping alleviate poverty in the country. By doing so, the students, will be able to kill two birds with one stone, because the project, in the long term, contributes to the government programme of food security.
!It is encouraging to see more young Bruneians showing their understanding of the problems being faced by the country and their high sense of solidarity towards their unfortunate fellow countrymen. Scot will provide assistance to the farmers in the form of equipment, seeds, and technical and educational support, such as effective methods of farming and the suitability of vegetables or crops according to soil fertility.
This will be Scot’s third project to address poverty in the Sultanate. This project aims to assist families from low-income background whose main livelihood is agriculture. Of course, the assistance will be very much helpful for this group of small-scale farmers. We want to see them succeed and to stand high with pride as the backbone of the country’s food self-sufficiency programme. It’s unwise, however, to judge the students’ assistance from its scale or quantity.
What we really want to see now is that more and more parties — be it government and private institutions, business entities, or members of the public — play an active role as stakeholders in the poverty-eradication and food security projects according to their own specialties. Especially now that the government of His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam is taking a more serious effort in making the dream about food self-sufficiency a reality through various programmes ranging from providing subsidies to farmers to sending officials and instructors abroad for trainings and doing research.
If we are fully aware of the real situation and want to see our country become less dependent on imports, as good citizens we have no other choice but to contribute actively to the food security programme.
Source: The Brunei Times
Author: Editorial
Published Date: 12 October 2011