Labour Min­is­ter Er­rol McLeod is ex­pect­ed to take to the Cab­i­net next week, a pro­pos­al to in­tro­duce sub­sidised labour from the URP pro­gramme in­to farm­ing and agri­cul­ture.Speak­ing at the open­ing of the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) head­quar­ters in Mara­bel­la on Wednes­day night, McLeod, MSJ chair­man, said the Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP) just does not have enough mon­ey to hire all the peo­ple who were un­em­ployed.He said the in­ten­tion, with­out re­duc­ing the so­cial in­tent of the URP, was to take some of them, train them to de­vel­op skills and do some se­ri­ous work, for which they would be paid high­er salaries.McLeod said a pi­lot project would be ini­ti­at­ed with the pineap­ple grow­ers in Table­land to gauge the vi­a­bil­i­ty of the pro­gramme be­fore it was utilised in oth­er food and agri­cul­tur­al de­vel­op­ment in T&T.

He said should this work, the cost of pineap­ples would be re­duced by 38 to 39 cents per pound.The min­is­ter said a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) to fa­cil­i­tate this process, be­tween the Min­istries of Agri­cul­ture and Labour, was be­ing re­vised."Next Thurs­day or so, there could be clear­ance for us to take it (MOU) to Cab­i­net and get the fi­nal word on our pro­ceed­ings to in­tro­duce sub­sidised labour from the URP pro­gramme to do re­al work, in a re­al sec­tor, that has be­come more nec­es­sary for de­vel­op­ment now than per­haps ever be­fore," he said.McLeod added the pro­pos­al had found al­most to­tal sup­port with the Gov­ern­ment.(YW)