SEXY YOUNG FARMERS

Sexy Farmer

 

Farming is rough.

It’s dirty and hot and sweaty. It makes you stink and it makes you very tired. It’s hard frigging work.

Now, let us replace the word ‘farming’ with the word ‘sex and read the entire thing over. Funny how one word can change your entire perspective.

That’s why the government is convinced that it can make farming sexy. It doesn’t take much to change perspective. But the little bit of change might mean the difference between success and failure.

Not So Sexy Farmer

Young people have been abandoning agriculture in droves for decades in St Lucia. Who wouldn’t prefer to work in air conditioned offices with stockinged, g-stringed girls instead of sweaty, stained peasant women? (Editor – that peasant woman is the mother of the nation, you malonette!)

Most rural youth who came to town to escape farming did not end up as bank tellers, however. Many ended up in bomhouses and in the HCJ (hospital,cemtery or jail). Meanwhile, the decline of agriculture hurt everybody. Even banks couldn’t have as many tellers if there were less farmers bringing less foreign exchange into the island. Ironic. So many of those stylish girls who looked down on farmers, couldn’t get a job and had to make bom, because there were fewer farmers.

So now, the government has to make farming sexy again.

Agriculture minister Musa JnBaptiste wants the youth to see farmers as business people who always were and once again could be the most productive and valuable part of the private sector. (Yep, that’s what they were for 40 years. The Chamber of Commerce was a net liability compared to the illiterate agro-business men and women who carried St Lucia on their backs from the late 50s to the mid-90s.)

Others imagine farmers to the best kind of scientists – the kind who are always applying their knowledge in useful and satsfying ways. Like Edsel Edmunds, that famous St Lucian scientist who discovered that nematodes were sucking the life out of the banana industry in the 1970s.

In the early 21^st century, it seems that the best way to make something sexy is to make it profitable. And so, the government is making lands and funds available to young farmers.

More than any other young people, farmers are getting access to resources, lands, money and training all in the hopes that the beads of sweaty on the hunky young men and subtle abs on healthy young women of the countryside can be made sexy again.

It’s too bad that Lil Wayne and Vybz Cartel aren’t singing about farming because that woud be a big help – most young people nowadays take their advice from pop stars not from agriculture ministers.

But if the youth are listening, Musa will have his way and country boys will once again drive the biggest vehicles. In this day and age, anything that makes more money is bound to win. But of course, that all depends on whethre St Lucian youth really want money,or whether they just want to continue to be pretend Americans with expensive things and no actual ambition at all.