Vegetables have many important functions in man’s everyday life. Nutritional, social and economic benefits. Its important in our daily diet cannot be over emphasized.With increased awareness on the need of a balanced diet, nutritional security and the consequential life style threatening diseases,( hypertension, obesity, diabetes etc.) There is an imperative need to incline one’s diet towards vegetables and organic foods. Vegetables have been reported to contribute immensely to our general well-being due to the following reasons:
1) Nutrition:
- Vegetables are rich and comparatively cheaper source of vitamins, minerals, salts, and other chemical substances, required by our bodies to maintain good health.
- Vegetable consuming enhances appetite, while providing much needed fiber to facilitate digestion and prevent constipation.
- Vegetables also contain a fair amount of protein. s
- Vegetables help in neutralizing acids produced during digestion especially after eating fatty foods while providing roughages that help in the movement of food in intestine.
2) Food:
Population is increasing, so too is the demand for food. It is imperative to sustain and balance increased food production with vegetables to meet the nutritional standard of people. Vegetables yield 4 to 10 times more than cereals. Thus, vegetables could play a vital role on the food industry as they are cheapest-sources of healthy natural foods and can admirably supplement high carbohydrate food elements in most of our diets.
3) Importance to a farmer:
Mankind is endowed with all types of vegetables leaf, stem, flower, fruit or seed for consumption by nature. Interestingly, these vegetables grow on different soil types and can grow all year round under the right growth conditions. Thus vegetables of very short duration can be grown as rain-fed crops or intercrops with either food crops or other vegetable species. This is an opportunity for the grower to earn regular and steady income to meet their daily demands.
4) Employment opportunities:
Vegetable cultivation requires intense and sustain farming operations starting from land preparation, to sowing of crops, management of crops to maturity and marketing. Each of these segments in the vegetable value chain provides ample and regular employment opportunities in rural, peri-urban and urban settings in Cameroon just like in many developing and developed economies in the world.
5) Industrial importance:
By virtue of its highly perishable nature, vegetable production demands careful planning from the time of planting through harvesting, storage, processing and distribution. Thus the growth of vegetable industry as a commercial enterprise would rely on allied enterprises like storage, processing, marketing, maintenance services and farm input enterprises to encourage vegetable growing.
6) Medicinal value:
Many vegetables possess medical properties and cure certain diseases. For instance, onion and garlic are reported to possess antibacterial property while many solanaceous (potatoes, tomatoes, egg plant, peppers) and cucurbitaceous (melons, cucumber) vegetables are reported to possess Vitamin D for example.