- Hotel promotes backyard farming among staff with CIC
Over the recent years, the world has been showing an avid interest in strengthening and increasing food production, taking into consideration the food shortages and steep price increases the world was beginning to face. As a result, many have turned their heads towards home gardening – an effective tool proven throughout the decades to yield crops successfully – to ensure food security and nutrition.
In efforts to give their staff a helping hand to overcome the crisis that plagues our country, Hilton Colombo partnered with CIC Agriculture to distribute thousands of manioc starter plants as a way of easing the incoming food crisis.
To honour this partnership, Hilton Colombo hosted a workshop where staff members were gifted starter packs that will guide them through the intricacies of backyard gardening. The workshop, hosted by a CIC representative, took the audience through novel technology that has now made gardening compact and time-efficient. He also spoke about how to maintain your garden, what to feed it with, and several other aspects of gardening that would generally dismay one from attempting it.
Hilton Colombo Area General Manager Manesh Fernando took the stage expressing his delight after this partnership. “This is a very magical moment for me because I believe this knowledge will be imparted in all our staff and their friends and family as well.”
Fernando also pointed out that we don’t realise what we are gifted with in this country, alluding to our resources in terms of sunlight, soil, and space we have in our houses.
“I’ve worked in about 10 different countries around the world, and in many of the most developed countries, they don’t have the land that we have in our homes,” he told the audience, adding that it is up to us to help ourselves instead of waiting for others to help us.
While there has been somewhat of a debate going on online as to why the citizens of this country must stoop to planting necessities in their backyard when those in power have it available to them at the snap of a finger, there has also been general consensus that we must give up waiting for developed countries to save up, rather take matters into our own hands. So despite vegetation being the bare minimum that the people should have access to, the fact of the matter is that we are haunted by a food shortage turning crisis, and unless we want to starve, taking a few minutes off a day to plant some seeds in the group won’t hurt.
This gesture is an effort from Hilton Colombo and CIC in taking the first step towards a sustainable future and a bountiful harvest. Fernando hopes that with them opening the gates for this venture, more and more businesses and corporations will follow through, using their example.
“We want to promote this amongst others, and we hope our staff too, spreads the word. The sooner we get the initiative going, the earlier we will be able to regain a semblance of normalcy.”
