We are al­so look­ing to en­cour­age the plant­i­ng of rice, Bharath told farm­ers at a meet­ing in San­ta Flo­ra. Cur­rent­ly we are on­ly pro­duc­ing five per cent of the rice we eat in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Of the three sta­ples that com­mand a healthy slice of this coun­try's $4 bil­lion food im­port bill, rice is the on­ly one that we pro­duce here. It's al­so the on­ly one that isn't a re­al can­di­date for taste re­place­ment. Cam­paigns to dis­place wheat and Irish pota­to on lo­cal menus with lo­cal­ly grown re­place­ments made from root crops like cas­sa­va and sweet pota­to won't eas­i­ly re­place the na­tion­al ap­petite for rice.

Any ef­fort to en­cour­age a pota­to re­place­ment in the lo­cal di­et and in­crease rice and chick­en pro­duc­tion lo­cal­ly is like­ly to make a re­al dent in food im­ports and dra­mat­i­cal­ly in­crease food se­cu­ri­ty. Just shy of a year ago, in April 2011, Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath ac­cu­rate­ly iden­ti­fied this short­fall and the need to act to pluck this low hang­ing fruit on the agri­cul­tur­al agen­da.

"We are al­so look­ing to en­cour­age the plant­i­ng of rice," Bharath told farm­ers at a meet­ing in San­ta Flo­ra. "Cur­rent­ly we are on­ly pro­duc­ing five per cent of the rice we eat in Trinidad and To­ba­go." That per­cent­age is a sharp drop from the 30 per­cent of the mar­ket that lo­cal pro­duc­ers sup­plied ten years and rep­re­sents a dan­ger­ous de­pen­den­cy on im­port sources, which are them­selves be­gin­ning to cur­tail their ex­port vol­ume. The sim­ple truth is that we are now play­ers in a world in which ex­port­ed food on the glob­al mar­ket is like­ly to di­min­ish as na­tions, even large pro­duc­ers, seek to sat­is­fy their in­ter­nal de­mand ful­ly first.

Min­is­ter Bharath has agreed that the key is­sues fac­ing rice farm­ers are land, tech­nol­o­gy im­ple­men­ta­tion, specif­i­cal­ly greater use of au­toma­tion, and the cost of cre­at­ing ef­fi­cient ir­ri­ga­tion sys­tems. So how, then, did we get to a po­si­tion in which 15 rice farm­ers are owed $1 mil­lion by Na­tion­al Flour Mills for 3,000 tonnes of their pro­duce for no less than three months?

One of the farm­ers, Za­hir Akaloo, was open with the Sun­day Guardian about his woes. He is deep in debt be­cause of out­stand­ing pay­ments which he claims are as high as $400,000. He owes banks, chem­i­cal shops, a mosque, sev­er­al banks and mem­bers of his fam­i­ly and is work­ing his 900 acres on a shoe­string. Akaloo ex­pects the crop to be half of its ca­pac­i­ty be­cause he can't af­ford to tend the crop prop­er­ly.

The farm­ers, just a few of the 6,000 be­lieved to re­main in the rice busi­ness, con­tin­ue to deal with many prob­lems iden­ti­fied by Min­is­ter Bharath a year be­fore. Ac­cord­ing to the farm­ers, a dam at Hy­draulic Road, Ca­roni is sup­posed to de­liv­er wa­ter to the rice fields but the arrange­ment has not been suc­cess­ful. Com­bine har­vesters for rice run $1.3 mil­lion each and farm­ers are find­ing it dif­fi­cult to re­pay loans for these items as well.

The NFM, for its part, has told the farm­ers that it is await­ing the dis­burse­ment of mon­ey from the Gov­ern­ment. Min­is­ter Bharath has been a vo­cal sup­port­er of the cause of farm­ers from ear­ly in his ap­point­ment. He took a po­lit­i­cal­ly risky po­si­tion in favour of farm­ers who had their crops bull­dozed by the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny in April 2011.

That sup­port needs to now be de­liv­ered as more in­fra­struc­ture boots in the mud and greater pri­or­i­ty giv­en to prompt and ef­fi­cient sup­port of farm­ing ini­tia­tives. The coun­try is still to be ad­vised on the sta­tus of the bold­est ini­tia­tive an­nounced so far, a lo­cal mega­farm project to be run by Two Broth­ers a Guyanese rice-grow­ing con­sor­tium. Will this mega­farm ini­tia­tive of­fer fresh guide­lines and best prac­tices that could be turned to the ad­van­tage of small­er lo­cal pro­duc­ers?

Where the Gov­ern­ment has made de­ci­sive and ful­ly en­gaged in­ter­ven­tions in lo­cal agri­cul­ture, specif­i­cal­ly in projects at Ve­ga de Oropouche, Mo­ra Al­lot­ment, La Com­pen­sa­tion and Es­mer­al­da, the projects have added val­ue and been wel­comed by farm­ers. It seems sur­pris­ing that in man­ag­ing a key sta­ple like rice, par­tic­u­lar­ly af­ter con­tin­u­ing com­plaints from farm­ers in this crit­i­cal branch of the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor, the Min­istry of Food Pro­duc­tion, Land and Ma­rine Af­fairs has not been more vis­i­bly ac­tive.