I GOT AN E-MAIL yesterday from a friend agreeing with our item the other day to grow our own food.

Robert Harland is a former British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent and now a resident of Bacolod. He is a former president of the Rotary Club of Bacolod Marapara and a member of the Negros Press Club.

With the world’s food shortage, Robert wrote, the world should consider adopting Britain’s wartime campaign to grow one’s own food.

Robert is British and, like my other British friend Neil Honeyman, must have found Bacolod the best place to live in.

The British did not wait for the food shortage to act. “A month before the start of World War II on 11 September 1939, the British government launched one of the most memorable slogans of the whole conflict, “Dig for Victory!” Harland wrote.

The Philippines should have done it long before the crisis came. Now, it’s here, let’s do it more seriously. Let us stop talking about the crisis. Let us encourage everybody to produce.

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The British government, Harland wrote, “called on every man and woman in Britain to turn lawns, flower-beds, and even sports fields into vegetable gardens. Every one was encouraged to become a vegetable gardener.”

How about it, Governor Pidio Zayco? Let all produce!

The purpose, said Harland, would not only provide essential food for families but also help the war effort by freeing up valuable space for war materials on the merchant shipping convoys.

Before the outbreak of war, Britain was importing 55 million tons of food a year, most of it coming from the U.S. and Canada. After the outbreak of the war, merchant shipping became the target of the German navy so the reliance on imported food had to be reduced.

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Hence the “Dig for Victory” campaign which was launched alongside food rationing and a farm modernization program. The campaign was so successful that more than 1.5 million people turned their gardens and spare land into vegetable allotments.

By 1943, Harland continued, over a million tons of vegetables were being grown this way each year.

Here’s something for Philippine officials from Robert Harland. We can do it, too.

“Lord Woolten, the Ministry of Food strongly believed the public should be educated and helped to grow vegetables. The Ministry took every opportunity to promote the importance of growing your own food.”

These included, Harland said, posters, leaflets, radio broadcasts and short films – even songs were written singing praises of growing one’s own food.

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People were also encouraged to keep chickens. Pigs were especially popular as they could be fed on kitchen waste. Some groups formed pig clubs sharing the meal when the animals were slaughtered. Even London’s Hyde Park had its own piggery. Goats were kept for milk and rabbits for stews.

Among the many posters produced to promote the campaign, the most memorable shows a booted foot pushing a spade into the soil with the slogan “Dig for Victory” printed above it.

After World War II there were still food shortages and people continued to grow their own vegetables. Today, many people in Britain still keep their vegetable gardens.

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Anybody who has access to President Arroyo and Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap send this item to make them launch this campaign. But I ask Gov. Zayco, let us start it here in Negros Occidental.

Enlist media to help in the campaign. I am far from hungry, I plant rice. I have chicken, ducks, cows, pigs, and goats. Vegetables and fruits, too. It was only last year I sold my fish ponds. This is only the start of food crisis.

As population grows and agricultural lands cannot cope up, bigger and more serious crises are still looming ahead.

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Let me go back to Robert Harland.

“Interestingly, during the war with strict rationing of meat and store-bought foods and the reliance on home grown vegetables, the British public had never been so healthy,” he said.

Harland quoted an observer, “Filipinos have been digging for victory for centuries, especially in rural areas, where almost every household has a chicken or two perhaps a goat and a pig.”

“But growing more of your own fruits and vegetables is certainly a good idea given the high prices in the market and they are also good for your own health.”

In today’s world of abundant if expensive food with accompanying obesity issues and high rates of heart diseases due to lack of exercise and food diets, perhaps we should consider the British style of digging for victory.

Beat food shortage. Plant something.

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