Shas­tri Boodan

T&T can still get in­to the busi­ness of pro­duc­ing and ex­port­ing pep­per spray.

Shar­ma Lal­la, the for­mer CEO of the now-de­funct Ca­roni Green Lim­it­ed, said this coun­try may not have missed the boat.

When Lal­la took over the show at Ca­roni Green, the com­pa­ny was ex­port­ing over 1.5 mil­lion pounds of pep­per, had well over $1 mil­lion dol­lars in the bank.

He said the au­dit­ed re­ports of the com­pa­ny would have in­di­cat­ed that Ca­roni Green fund­ed its own op­er­a­tions from 2015-2017 with no fi­nan­cial sup­port from the Gov­ern­ment.

Lal­la said no ex­pla­na­tion was giv­en by the gov­ern­ment why they choose to fur­ther put the squeeze on agri­cul­ture and fold Ca­roni Green in April 2017.

Lal­la told Guardian Me­dia, “We were pro­duc­ing pep­pers and paw paw on 100 acres, we had en­tered in­to the ex­port mar­ket and our pep­pers were do­ing very well. Our plans were to en­ter in­to down­stream pro­duc­tion to mon­e­tize our lo­cal pep­pers. The com­pa­ny had pur­chased a pep­per grind­ing ma­chine for $75,000. It was stored at Brechin Cas­tle, Cou­va and I don’t know what be­came of it. We had en­tered in­to talks with grow­ers of the Moru­ga Scor­pi­on Pep­per and the next stage was to en­ter in­to pro­duc­tion to ex­tract the cap­sicum from the pep­per. Cap­sicum is used pep­per spray pro­duc­tion.

The de­mand for non-lethal self-de­fense items as pep­per spray is see­ing a glob­al de­mand, and there is now and lo­cal de­mand for pep­per spray. If Ca­roni Green was not shut down a few years ago we would have by now di­ver­si­fied in­to the pro­duc­tion of pep­per mash, which the coun­try has to im­port and the pro­duc­tion of cap­sicum. We had then en­tered in­to talks with sev­er­al lo­cal pri­vate sec­tor busi­ness op­er­a­tions who were more than will­ing to part­ner with us for these prod­ucts. T&T has the Moru­ga Scor­pi­on, one of the hottest pep­pers in the world, and it is not be­ing mon­e­tized in a way that it should.”

Lal­la said it is not too late to re­vive Ca­roni Green Lim­it­ed since all the in­fra­struc­ture the com­pa­ny ex­ist­ed in is still avail­able. Lal­la is al­so an ex­ec­u­tive mem­ber of the Cou­va Point Lisas Cham­ber of Com­merce and was the CEO of Ca­roni (1975) lim­it­ed from 1998-2002.