Five weeks af­ter Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert pre­sent­ed the fis­cal pack­age for 2024/2025, the na­tion’s youth are still talk­ing about the state of the coun­try’s econ­o­my.

At the top of their lists of in­ter­ests and con­cerns is youth in­volve­ment in pol­i­cy­mak­ing, ex­pand­ing dig­i­tal ac­cess, strength­en­ing vo­ca­tion­al ed­u­ca­tion, fight­ing crime and de­vel­op­ing agri­cul­ture.

On Sep­tem­ber 30, Im­bert an­nounced the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor had been al­lo­cat­ed $1.184 bil­lion. From that, $60 mil­lion in in­cen­tives were al­ready pro­vid­ed to over nine thou­sand farm­ers.

How­ev­er, de­vel­op­ment econ­o­mist and lec­tur­er Dr Mar­lene Attz stressed that more needs to be done for this sec­tor.

In a post-bud­get fo­rum host­ed by Hillview Col­lege yes­ter­day, sev­er­al stu­dents from Hillview Col­lege, St Joseph Con­vent, St Joseph, and St Au­gus­tine Girls’ High School ques­tioned how the Gov­ern­ment pri­ori­tis­es bud­get al­lo­ca­tion for each min­istry.

They al­so want­ed to know how they could help im­prove the econ­o­my go­ing for­ward.

While stu­dents asked ques­tions such as how T&Tcould pro­duce its own food in­stead of im­port­ing and why they should not mi­grate, Attz en­cour­aged the young­sters not to shy away from this sec­tor as it can pro­vide very prof­itable ca­reers for them in the fu­ture. Stu­dents were al­so en­cour­aged to take ad­van­tage of the many agri­cul­tur­al pro­grammes cur­rent­ly of­fered by the Min­istry of Youth De­vel­op­ment and Na­tion­al Ser­vice.

Attz said, “There are eight bil­lion in this world and every­body has to eat. So, when we’re not pay­ing at­ten­tion to agri­cul­ture or we think that we must put some in­cen­tives in place that are dif­fi­cult for our farm­ers to ac­cess. Every­body has to eat and if you don’t grow what you eat, you’re vul­ner­a­ble. We must do more for agri­cul­ture.”

“Peo­ple think the bud­get is about the Gov­ern­ment. The bud­get is not about the Gov­ern­ment. It’s about the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go. It’s about you most im­por­tant­ly. Those of you who are Gen-Z. Those of you who will have the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to car­ry on pol­i­cy. The bud­get is im­por­tant to you be­cause de­ci­sions made to­day by the Gov­ern­ment will im­pact you,” she added.