Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter Sen­a­tor De­vant Ma­haraj is con­cerned about the gen­er­al lack of in­ter­est by young peo­ple in agri­cul­ture and he says that is­sue, as well as labour short­ages in the sec­tor, must be ad­dressed in the short and medi­um term.

Ma­haraj raised the is­sue in the fea­ture ad­dress at launch of the Agri­cul­ture Now Train­ing Unit's (AT­NU) Work­force As­sess­ment Cen­tre. The cer­e­mo­ny was held on Wednes­day evening at the Min­istry of Ter­tiary in Port-of-Spain.

Ma­haraj said T&T's agri­cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ty was af­fect­ed by a de­plet­ing work­force be­cause farm­ers were get­ting old­er.

He said the sit­u­a­tion was so se­vere that some farm­ers had to bring in Guyanese labour­ers but they left as soon as they found oth­er em­ploy­ment in T&T.

Ma­haraj said one farmer paid $400 a day per work­er to har­vest pep­pers but those work­ers quit as soon as the dry sea­son set in, re­fus­ing to work in warm out­door con­di­tions.

"They rather work KFC or URP for $67.50 a day," he said.

Ma­haraj called for a change in the ethics and cul­ture of work in T&T. He said a new gen­er­a­tion of farm­ers must be found since peo­ple could not eat "con­crete and plas­tic."

How­ev­er, he ad­mit­ted, to make any­thing at­trac­tive to young peo­ple there must be a lot of mon­ey in­volved. He said there are many well or­gan­ised farm­ers in the coun­try who are earn­ing high in­comes that could sup­port lux­u­ri­ous lifestyles.

Ma­haraj said the Food Pro­duc­tion Min­istry had launched a se­ries of ini­tia­tives to get more young peo­ple in­volved in agri­cul­ture and is work­ing on mem­o­ran­dums of un­der­stand­ing with Ser­vol and the Youth Train­ing Cen­tre (YTC) aimed at vul­ner­a­ble, at risk young peo­ple.

He said de­spite the chal­lenges, the sec­tor was grow­ing and the food in­fla­tion rate had re­mained at sin­gle dig­its for the first six months of the year.