Rhon­dor Dowlat

With­in a three-day pe­ri­od, some 170 tonnes of food and toi­letries will be sent to Venezuela by plane, while 600 tonnes will be sent via sea next week.

This was re­vealed yes­ter­day by the Venezue­lan Vice Min­is­ter of Do­mes­tic Trade, Colonel Re­nier Urb�ez.

Speak­ing to the me­dia in the South Ter­mi­nal at Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port af­ter two Venezue­lan mil­i­tary car­go planes ar­rived to start load­ing the items for trans­porta­tion to the Latin Amer­i­can coun­try, Urb�ez said it was hoped they'd get the items to the pub­lic fair­ly quick­ly.

Ac­cord­ing to Urb�ez, the food will be sent first­ly to the Su­cre State, which has a pop­u­la­tion of just over 700,000 peo­ple.

Yes­ter­day, 12 tonnes of rice were sent on a first trip, which left just af­ter mid­day, along with 33 tonnes of chick­en, which con­sists of 16,000 heads of chick­en.

Asked if man­u­fac­tur­ers were paid for the goods, which as one of the ma­jor con­cerns raised by the busi­ness­es, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­er's As­so­ci­a­tion, Dr Ramesh Ramdeen, said they re­ceived the pay­ment from Venezuela via their re­spec­tive bank ac­counts.

Robin Phillips, Mar­ket­ing Di­rec­tor at Arawak, said the first flight took 3,000 heads of chick­en, while the sec­ond left with 7,000 and the third, 3,000. The val­ue of chick­en ex­ports to­talled ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$100,000. The to­tal cost of the items to be shipped in this first phase was said to be US$27 mil­lion.

Ramdeen dis­closed that the oth­er items to be sent with­in the three-day pe­ri­od in­clud­ed pas­ta, pow­der milk and ketchup.

"From Tues­day toi­let pa­per and oth­er bulky goods will be go­ing to Venezuela by boat," Ramdeen said.

Asked if cit­i­zens should be wor­ried about short­age of goods here in T&T, now that man­u­fac­tur­ers were sup­ply­ing Venezuela, Ramdeen said, "No There will be no short­age as the ca­pac­i­ty is most­ly in stocks, stock­pil­ing in­ven­to­ries. But what this new agree­ment should do is ramp up ca­pac­i­ty by the man­u­fac­tur­ers.

"This gen­er­at­ing of for­eign ex­change would help man­u­fac­tur­ers to source their raw ma­te­ri­als for pro­duc­tion."

About eight lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers have com­mit­ted to de­liv­er­ing the re­quired goods for use by the Venezue­lan mar­ket, which is larg­er than all of Cari­com com­bined.