Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Pres­i­dent of Agri­cul­ture So­ci­ety of Trinidad and To­ba­go (ASTT) Dhano Sookoo is fear­ful that the lo­cal agri­cul­ture sec­tor will shut down due to COVID19.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Sookoo said, “the agri­cul­ture lo­cal pro­duc­tion is go­ing to shut down be­cause when farm­ers can­not re­cov­er their in­vest­ments, they have loans to pay, they have fam­i­lies still to sup­port they are not ben­e­fi­cia­ries of the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board ben­e­fit pro­gram and they can­not ac­cess the un­em­ploy­ment re­lief grant and so­cial ser­vices.”

She added: “At this time there is ex­ces­sive lost be­cause re­mem­ber peo­ple are re­strict­ed in their move­ment that is one Two, ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter of So­cial Ser­vices, they give out 75,000 food cards each to the val­ue of $500. Many of these peo­ple even if they had liq­uid cash in their hand they would have gone and sup­port­ed the com­mu­ni­ty veg­etable stall and lo­cal mar­kets and ven­dors and you would have a lot of lo­cal pro­duce be­ing bought. How­ev­er, when they are giv­en the food cards those can on­ly be ten­dered at a su­per­mar­ket”, she said.

“When they go in­to the su­per­mar­kets they will be pur­chas­ing im­port­ed prod­ucts,” Sookoo said.

The ASTT Pres­i­dent said she can­not quan­ti­fy the loss­es but said she knows there is over one mil­lion pounds of wa­ter­mel­on or more out on the fields. She re­port­ed that corn farm­ers al­so have a glut of pro­duce with some in ex­cess of over 100 thou­sand heads of corn to har­vest.

“The vol­ume is there be­cause the sales are not there”, she said

Sookoo said that to keep her farm­ers mo­ti­vat­ed she and her di­rec­tors are cur­rent­ly vis­it­ing farm­ers and lend­ing moral sup­port.

“We are al­so us­ing so­cial me­dia to mar­ket some of the pro­duce and to get house­holds to get ac­cess to fresh lo­cal pro­duce and we are push­ing a buy lo­cal cam­paign,” she said.

“I ques­tioned that the thou­sands of ham­pers are giv­en out every­day, how much in those ham­pers are ac­tu­al­ly lo­cal­ly pro­duce goods, is there any bo­di, pump­kin, bha­gi, ochros, wa­ter­mel­on and is there cu­cum­bers... how many are in those ham­pers,” Sookoo said.

The ASTT pres­i­dent said peo­ple can man­age for two weeks with three pounds of pump­kin, a bun­dle of bo­di, two dozen ochro and a bun­dle of callaloo bush, de­scrib­ing it as a good healthy nu­tri­tious veg­etable sup­ply at a cost of around $300.

Sookoo said she is see­ing thou­sands of ham­pers be­ing dis­trib­uted but said those ham­pers are in no way sup­port­ing lo­cal farm­ers.