By Fern Napwatt, DailyPost, The recent initiative of ban on junk food in the Torba province will require an expert and is a long process.
The Torba Provincial Planner, Mr Michael Silona said that the initiative to ban junk food was one of the decisions of the Torba Tourism Council.
“The original idea was to start with bungalow operators to stop feeding guests with imported food but to feed them with locally grown food,” he said.
“But again this will require quite a long process and an expertise to do the organic certification exercise and it will take some time before we can achieve it.”
According to a freelance reporter of The Guardian, Ms Eleanor Roy, the head of the Torba tourism council, Fr Luc Dini, said that a ban on foreign food imports would improve the health and well being of the people of Torba.
“Dini has ordered tourism bungalows to serve guests only locally grown, organic food, with a plan to introduce legislation within the next two years banning the importation of all foreign food. Torba aims to be Vanuatu’s first organic province by the year 2020,”
Ms Roy reported.
Mr Dini also stated the national government through its relevant authorities was supportive of his plan and were keen to see this will be tolerated by locals and tourists.
The Assistant Agriculture officer for Torba, Paul Harrison said that there is abundance of locally grown food as well as food sourced from the sea.
“Here in Torba, we some rich islands like the island of Gaua, and parts of Vanualava that can yield a high quantity of local produce as well as kava, but again it depends on the demand,”
he said.
“Having a ban on junk is a good idea for starters, so the locals can go back to do more gardening to meet the demand of locals as well as tourists when they visit- we still need improvement of skills on how to present it so to make it appealing to our customers from overseas.”
Mr Harrison said that since the new market house in Sola will be opening soon, he is looking forward to having more farmers having access to market as well as training that the DoA and TVET will give to the farmers to enhance their production and target other market opportunities.