Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has promised to en­gage in agri­cul­tur­al di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion if she is re­turned to of­fice.

She was speak­ing to farm­ers short­ly be­fore she dis­trib­uted com­pen­sato­ry cheques to 500 cane farm­ers at En­chant­ed Gar­dens com­plex, New Grant, last week.

The funds were al­lo­cat­ed by the Eu­ro­pean Union to ad­dress the neg­a­tive so­cial and eco­nom­ic im­pact fol­low­ing the clo­sure of Ca­roni (1975) Ltd in 2003. Per­sad-Bisses­sar said even though the funds were long in com­ing, her Gov­ern­ment was hap­py to fi­nal­ly fa­cil­i­tate the pay­ment of the first tranche of $27 mil­lion.

Promis­ing to ad­vance agri­cul­ture in­to a strong, sta­ble and vi­able in­dus­try, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said she hoped to use agri­cul­ture to pro­vide good in­comes and jobs to many peo­ple.

She said since the Na­tion­al Food Ac­tion Plan 2012-2015 was im­ple­ment­ed over 38,000 me­tres of agri­cul­ture ac­cess roads were re­ha­bil­i­tat­ed.

"Wa­ter man­age­ment and avail­abil­i­ty have vast­ly im­proved, with over 213 ponds con­struct­ed and over 226,000 me­tres of riv­er cours­es de­silt­ed. An en­hanced Agri­cul­ture In­cen­tive Plan was de­vel­oped and by fis­cal year 2013-2014, a to­tal of 3,390 ap­pli­ca­tions for agri­cul­tur­al in­cen­tives were processed," Per­sad-Bisses­sar said. That, she added, was aimed at small farm­ers and amount­ed to $18.8 mil­lion.

"By June 2014, Cab­i­net ex­tend­ed this plan by ap­prov­ing a fur­ther en­hanced Agri­cul­tur­al In­cen­tive Pro­gramme to cater for large farms and by the end of April 2014, 391 loans, with a val­ue of $100,728,608, were ap­proved by the Agri­cul­ture De­vel­op­ment Bank for agri­cul­tur­al ser­vice, agro pro­cess­ing, ma­rine fish­ery, or­na­men­tal fish­ery, food crops, forestry and live­stock," she said.

With the es­tab­lish­ment of the Na­tion­al Prae­di­al Lar­ce­ny Squad in 2013, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said 51 peo­ple were ar­rest­ed and 75 of­fences de­tect­ed.

She said the Com­mer­cial Large Farms Pro­gramme (CLFP) has al­so been suc­cess­ful as 12 large-scale farms were op­er­at­ing pro­duc­tive­ly.

"This has no doubt helped us to reach the land­mark achieve­ment of a 5.1 per cent ex­pan­sion in food pro­duc­tion and a two per cent re­duc­tion in the food im­port bill by March last year," she said.

Plan­ning Min­is­ter Dr Bhoe Tewarie said if Gov­ern­ment re­turned to of­fice, farm­ers would con­tin­ue to get loans at pref­er­en­tial rates.