Shas­tri Boodan

Food pro­duc­tion in­creased, while food prices fell un­der the PNM, says Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Arnold Pig­gott. He said this was just one ini­tia­tive of the PNM dur­ing the par­ty's tenure in of­fice. Pig­gott was speak­ing dur­ing the par­ty's po­lit­i­cal meet­ing at Chin Chin Junc­tion, Cunu­pia, on Sat­ur­day night. He said 150,000 pack­ets of seeds, dis­trib­uted in 2008 and 2009, led to in­creased pro­duc­tion dur­ing 2009, "a bumper year for the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor." He said con­sumers ben­e­fit­ed from more food and bet­ter prices last year, as food price in­fla­tion fell to one per cent in De­cem­ber. Pig­gott, how­ev­er, not­ed that this fig­ure rose to 2.7 per cent in Jan­u­ary 2010. He said the mega farms at Ch­aguara­mas and Tuck­er Val­ley pro­duced close to 350,000 tones of pro­duce for the lo­cal mar­ket.

He said moves by the Gov­ern­ment al­lowed the farm­ing com­mu­ni­ty to get a sup­ply of wa­ter dur­ing the harsh dry sea­son, as wa­ter was re­leased down­stream from dams and reser­voirs. Pig­gott said small farm­ers were ben­e­fit­ing through sev­er­al projects that saw the im­prove­ment of guar­an­teed mar­kets and trans­port in­fra­struc­ture, while sev­en farmer's mar­kets had been opened to give small farm­ers an av­enue to sell pro­duce on week­ends. He said the six years the UNC spent in of­fice, noth­ing sub­stan­tial was done to de­vel­op agri­cul­ture. He said the Op­po­si­tion to­day of­fered no so­lu­tions. "They op­pose every­thing and rec­om­mend noth­ing of val­ue," Pig­gott said.

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mustapha Ab­dul- Hamid, the Ch­agua­nas East MP, crit­i­cised uni­ty arrange­ments among op­po­si­tion forces, say­ing that such arrange­ments had a his­to­ry of col­laps­ing. He al­so crit­i­cised Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar's speech on Fri­day at the Emer­ald Plaza, St Au­gus­tine. He said Per­sad-Bisses­sar's pre­sen­ta­tion lacked lus­tre and of­fered noth­ing, while the or­gan­is­ers in­stead fo­cused on en­ter­tain­ing UNC sup­port­ers with songs from Ce­line Dion. Ab­dul-Hamid al­so ques­tioned the in­tegri­ty of Jack Warn­er, the Ch­agua­nas West MP. He said Warn­er's name was called in a 2006 World Cup tick­et scan­dal that was in­ves­ti­gat­ed by a Unit­ed King­dom news­pa­per. He said the news­pa­per re­port al­leged that Warn­er and his rel­a­tives made huge prof­its from tick­et sales.