In many societies, there is sometimes a tendency to take food and agriculture for granted. Trinidad and Tobago has not escaped that “curse” given that we are an industrialised island with a heavily skewed focus on the energy sector. For many of us, our relationship with food starts at the supermarket or restaurant. We often do not contemplate the process by which that food item made it to the supermarket shelves or our refrigerators. The truth is, without the land and animals, and a network of people, processes, technologies, and organisations, life as we know it would be unsustainable. Food and agriculture are the cornerstones of society.
It is no coincidence therefore, that when it is time to celebrate the establishment of UWI St Augustine’s Faculty of Food and Agriculture (FFA), we celebrate a legacy that not only stretches all the way back to the birth of this campus, but precedes it by several decades. The FFA is the institutional descendant of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture (ICTA), created on August 30, 1921.
ICTA was “the recognised centre for postgraduate training in tropical agriculture for the agricultural services of the [British] Colonial Empire”, an article from Nature magazine stated in 1938. Its research was focused mainly on “problems relating to cacao, sugar, bananas, and citrus fruits”. The college did important work, but it was primarily for the benefit of Britain, both in teaching and learning, as well as scholarship.
Nevertheless, it was upon this institutional and intellectual foundation that the St Augustine Campus was born in 1960. Established in October of that year, the Faculty of Agriculture would grow to become the only Faculty of its kind in the region and a leader in research and education in agriculture, nutrition, agriculture-related business, entrepreneurship, and food production technology. In 1996, the Faculty of Agriculture was consolidated, albeit for a short period, with the Faculty of Natural Sciences to form the Faculty of Science and Agriculture (FSA).
As time has passed, the faculty, which became known as the Faculty of Food and Agriculture (FFA) in 2012, has grown into its own. No longer a colonial institution, the FFA serves the Caribbean by providing educational opportunities to students across the region, fostering scholarship that has had an enormous impact on our island economies, and supporting regional governments and associations in the development of policy related to food and its production.
A century after its establishment, the Caribbean needs the FFA more than ever given the threats to national and regional food and nutrition security. Among other things, the existential threat that is climate change coupled with voracious appetites for foreign food, have resulted in little attention being paid to this sector. In Trinidad and Tobago, agriculture has not had a real seat at the proverbial table for many decades.
Within recent times, the economic consequences of the pandemic including threats to supply chains that impact the ability to easily import food, linked to reduced availability of foreign exchange, have forced a change in thinking with respect to agriculture and its role in securing food and nutrition, nationally and regionally.
In this issue of UWI TODAY, we celebrate the FFA’s centennial legacy, but a legacy is more than names, buildings and time. The true legacy of the faculty is in its vision of intellectual curiosity harnessed for the benefit of society. It is in its commitment to developing human potential, particularly the potential within our region. The legacy of the FFA is in the many faculty, staff and students who worked to realise the mission of this institution over its 100-year history.
So, how do we best acknowledge the FFA and its accomplishments? I submit that it is by continuing its work at the highest possible standard. I believe that the Caribbean needs this faculty more than it ever has before. We should all now work in strong collaboration with its staff and students to ensure that its next 100 years will bear even more fruit for the region.
