University of the West Indies (UWI) pro vice-chancellor, Professor Clement Sankat, says he is "truly appalled" to see what is happening to former Caroni Ltd lands. He also lamented that despite the campus' rich tradition of agricultural training, there was a declining interest in the profession, an ageing community of farmers and poor rural infrastructure. Sankat said he observed housing and concrete now stood on a lot of former sugarcane lands. "We are not paying enough attention to the preservation of our best agricultural lands," he said, at the launch yesterday of the book, Soils of the Caribbean, by internationally acclaimed T&T soil scientist, Professor Emeritus Nazeer Ahmad, at the office of UWI's St Augustine campus principal.
Sankat made the comments even as the Government announced a major food production drive at yesterday's post-Cabinet media briefing. He said food security was central to the sustainable development of T&T and the region and lauded Ahmad's attempt to revive the good work done in the days of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture. He said by 1949, the college was established as the premier centre in the world for teaching and research in tropical agriculture and its library was recognised as the most comprehensive on the subject.
Ahmad, one of the few surviving associates of the institution, has documented more than 60 years of work in his book, Sankat noted.
He said the St Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) was born out of the merging of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture and the University College of the West Indies in 1960. The School of Agriculture and its predecessor, the Faculty of Agriculture, was the founding faculty at the campus and agriculture had been at the core of UWI's teaching, research and scholarship from the beginning, Sankat said. He added: "We have to recapture and rekindle the spirit of the days of the Imperial College. UWI has begun its part in this goal." He vowed the campus' School of Agriculture would be transformed.
Sankat said campus officials would meet with stakeholders to make the school a leading light in agricultural training. Permanent secretary in the Ministry of Food Production, Land and Marine Affairs, Edwina Leacock, speaking at the launch, said Bharath had been making every effort to have agriculture become a profession of choice once more. She said he held discussions with Education Minister, Dr Tim Gopeesingh, to get agriculture back in schools.
More info
There may be a global concern with food security but soil scientist, Professor Nazeer Ahmad, is convinced Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean did not have that problem. "There may be a problem in some countries, not our region," Ahmad told the T&T Guardian at the launch of his book, Soils of the Caribbean, at UWI yesterday. He added: "We have to start by redefining food security, "We eat too much of what we consider staple...imported foods like flour, saltfish, salted meat and such. "If we change what we eat, we will change the picture of food security." He said land use was the key to food security and should begin with a proper land capability study.