HERBALIST ROBERT CRICHLOW claims that the health of Barbadians is under threat from genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
And although he has no scientific evidence to back his case, Crichlow, who goes by his alternate name, Arias Blood, said he believed GMOs were the cause of the reported increase in illness.
Sitting under an ackee tree in the backyard of his St Michael home, Arias told the DAILY NATION that whether people wanted to accept it or not, there was a link between GMOs and non-communicable diseases. This was why he is on a mission to educate fellow Barbadians about the benefits of living a natural lifestyle designed by God.
“Some of the foods that we have now may look like the foods we used to know but certainly they are not. They are a different type of food all together. Evidence is clear. Now you have seedless grapes, seedless dates, seedless watermelons, seedless everything and that is barren food.
“Same as a man that don’t have testicles, also known as seeds; can’t reproduce. The okras that had thorns used to stick you very hard because those were to scrape the walls of your stomach. Now you have okras with little hairs. So this is food for commercial purposes, not for health benefits, and it is causing a lot of problems,” he said.
When Arias speaks about lifestyle habits that destroy one’s body, he does so from experience.
A former addict, the 55-year-old did not shy away from talking about the damage drugs did to his body, both physically and spiritually.
In fact, he admitted he was a horrible person, and when he was hooked on drugs, he was often referred to as the black sheep of the family.
“My mother always would ask me, ‘You does look in the glass?’ So one day I looked and knowing myself and how I was, I wasn’t satisfied so I decided to turn it around. Replaced it with holistic living because I could see the deterioration in myself.
“And thank God for my mother because she stood behind me all of the time and I never had a relapse.”
That was a little more than 20 years ago and it was then he was reintroduced to herbs and yoga. He began to travel to places like Japan, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad, gaining much knowledge and going deeper into research about what he called real medicine, or what is referred to as alternative medicine.
After several years of education, he decided to try to achieve his objective on a larger scale and in 2012 he applied to the Barbados Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation’s (BADMC) land for the landless programme.
A former student of Parkinson Memorial School, Arias wanted the land area to plant organic trees and other foods.
He said a feasibility study was conducted and financial backing arranged when the BADMC responded with a letter of approval, dated February 5, 2013, to lease land. However, he said that up to this day, there was no further response from the corporation and so his goal had not materialised like he hoped.
Nevertheless, Arias isn’t daunted and though on a much reduced scale, he started his farming. Through encouragement, he even has several people planting too.
“I can see my people already down a road that they shouldn’t be down in the first place and don’t want to come back.
“The old people always used to say that somebody got to be able to tell the people to come back. I find that is my purpose for living. Using the plants and seeing the healthy side of it and knowing the foods that we grow up with, you can see the difference,” Arias said.
“So health and spirituality go hand in hand. If you want to become healthy, then you have to become spiritual. Then your whole life will change.” (SDB Media)