Shas­tri Boodan

New­ly ap­point­ed Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Clarence Ramb­harat is start­ing off his first full week in the po­si­tion by meet­ing with key stake­hold­ers in the sec­tor. He said in an in­ter­view that he will he hold­ing talks with of­fi­cials the Agri­cul­tur­al So­ci­ety of TT (ASTT), the Table­land Farm­ers Pineap­ple As­so­ci­a­tion and the Sheep and Goat Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion.

The min­is­ter said he has plans to push the sec­tor for­ward and wants to touch base with agri­cul­tur­al or­ga­ni­za­tions to find out, among oth­er things, the ex­tent to which they use tech­nol­o­gy and mod­ern pro­ce­dures to con­duct busi­ness.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment, spokesper­sons for some of the group's Ramb­harat will be meet­ing with over the next few days had their own wish lists they want­ed to share with the Min­is­ter.

Shi­raz Khan, head of T&T Farm­ers' Union, said he wants the new min­is­ter to ad­dress the is­sues of leas­es. Khan said many farm­ers are with­out leas­es–some have not re­ceived leas­es while oth­ers have not had their leas­es re­newed. He said their is al­so need for a clear land use pol­i­cy to pro­mote agri­cul­ture, en­hance food se­cu­ri­ty and re­duce the food im­port bill.

Ra­mash Ram­sumair, chair­man of the Ta­ble Pineap­ple Framers As­so­ci­a­tion, wants to see more ini­tia­tives aimed at ed­u­cat­ing cit­i­zens to take an ac­tive role in agri­cul­ture. He said he wants to see every house­hold in­volved in some lev­el of food pro­duc­tion as a means of re­duc­ing T&T's high food im­port bill.

He al­so plans to speak to the min­is­ter about de­clin­ing pineap­ple pro­duc­tion. Ram­sumair said a few years ago 2000 acres of land un­der pineap­ple pro­duc­tion but the fig­ure dropped by 75 per cent over the past few years.

ASTT pres­i­dent Dhano Sookoo said she wants the new min­is­ter to look at re­align­ing all of the in­sti­tu­tions in the min­istry and the sec­tor be­cause there are too many "square pegs in round holes." She said ur­gent steps should be tak­en to de­vel­op the sec­tor us­ing mod­ern farm­ing tech­niques.

"An ag­gres­sive dri­ve is need­ed to en­cour­age the ex­port of lo­cal pro­duce to fill the de­mand of the West In­di­an di­as­po­ra in North Amer­i­ca, Eu­rope and re­gion­al mar­ket," Sookoo said.