Supporting local
agriculture is essential
Thank you, Tombo Lono for writing in a Nov. 29 letter to the editor about the need to focus on buying local.
It was October 1908, when they stopped allowing our avocados into California and other areas of the mainland. A battle to change that has been waging for a long time.
There are other issues that compound this. The USDA’s National Agriculture Statistic service kept accurate numbers on the imports until 2008 when that record keeping was no longer funded. Using statistics from then, we grow and sell about 1 million pounds of avocados and import 4 million pounds but at the same time, we grew and sold 40,000 of lemons but import 4 million pounds. About 1 million pounds of citrus was produced locally and 22 million pounds were imported. I’d venture to say it’s even worse now.
Seeing our well-known locally owned groceries selling pummelo (pomelo) from California, tree tomatoes from New Zealand, oranges form Australia, etc., is disheartening to fruit growers across the state. Walking into a store when the first thing you see are Mexican avocados during the height of our avocado season is a kick in the okole.
We as a group of consumers, activists and the state Department of Agriculture need advocates to convince these stores to feature our produce upfront. They need to promote it and we need to buy it. If the store doesn’t sell it, go to the farmers markets and farm stands all over the islands. We should be doing that anyway. Don’t treat it as a flea market, it’s not. We should expect to pay more not less for fresher, high-quality local produce. Part of our problem is that many growers don’t understand cost of production. https://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/ET-13.pdf is a good guide to follow.
Supporting local agriculture is essential for all of us, not just from but vegetables and proteins from ranchers and fishermen., We’re all in it together.
Ken Love
Executive Director
Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers
Get the facts
The anti-maskers are ignoring basic science and statistics. Go to any reputable website, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and CDC and get the facts. Masks, along with distancing and hand sanitizing cut rates of infection. A study in the Midwest, where some counties mandated masks and others did not, shows a strong reduction in cases in masked counties. Masks are not 100% effective but keep hospitals from overflowing. Also masks remind us we are in a pandemic and should take care to protect ourselves and the vulnerable.
PS: Sweden has a 2.7% death rate, while other Nordic countries did much better due to early mandated measures, plus universal health care meant healthier populations to begin with. The U.S. COVID-19 death rate is almost 2%, so if 100 million get infected, two million people will die. Hang in there a few more months until a vaccine is available and stay safe.
Stan Chraminski
Kona
Letters policy
Letters to the editor should be 300 words or less and will be edited for style and grammar. Longer viewpoint guest columns may not exceed 800 words. Submit online at www.westhawaiitoday.com/?p=118321 or via email to letters@westhawaiitoday.com.
