Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath is plan­ning mass com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of the T&T-bred Scor­pi­on pep­per, the hottest pep­per in the world, as well as the buf­fa­lyp­so, which was bred here af­ter years of ex­per­i­men­ta­tion by lo­cal re­searchers. Speak­ing to re­porters af­ter com­mis­sion­ing of the Ota­heite fish­ing fa­cil­i­ty on Fri­day, Bharath said work is cur­rent­ly be­ing done on the Scor­pi­on pep­per. "When one looks at the com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion of a prod­uct like that, it can be used in sev­er­al ways apart from agri­cul­ture. It can be used for mak­ing mace. It is just a ques­tion of com­mer­cial­is­ing it." "We are im­port­ing a lot of pep­pers from Cos­ta Ri­ca right now and we are now go­ing to be look­ing at grow­ing large quan­ti­ties of pep­per in T&T," he said.

Bharath said oth­er lo­cal pro­duce such as paw paw, will be grown for the man­u­fac­ture of ketchup, while unique lo­cal prod­ucts such as pom­me­cythere juice and lemon/fever grass juice will al­so be mar­ket­ed. "We will have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to grow hun­dreds of acres of pom­me­cythere to pro­duce juice which is health­i­er than what you are im­port­ing. Lemon grass or fever grass that grows wild makes a won­der­ful juice and we are go­ing to com­mer­cialise those things in the next 12 months," Bharath said. With re­gards to the buf­fa­lyp­so, Bharath said: "I have got in con­tact with re­searcher Dr Steve Ben­nett. As you know, the buf­fa­lyp­so pro­duces the high­est qual­i­ty milk for the man­u­fac­ture of mozarel­la cheese in the world.

"Many oth­er coun­tries have tak­en our buf­fa­lyp­so and have com­mer­cialised it and are mak­ing a lot of mon­ey with it. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, a lot of our buf­fa­lyp­so herd has been hit with a dis­ease called bru­cel­losis, so we are now in the po­si­tion of iso­lat­ing the buf­fa­lyp­so so we can start the herd again," Bharath said. With re­gards to his bud­get ex­pec­ta­tions, Bharath said he plans to con­tin­ue the work he start­ed 15 months ago. He added that moves will be made to en­cour­age for­eign food fran­chis­es to use lo­cal­ly grown food. He al­so not­ed that Price­Wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers will be do­ing a study to re­struc­ture the Land Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry.

"It will be a to­tal re­vamp of the Land Di­vi­sion. We met to­day with the Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands and all em­ploy­ees of the Land Di­vi­sion un­der­stood how crit­i­cal it is to get land tenure un­der con­trol. A lot of peo­ple are de­pen­dent on land tenure to get loans," Bharath said. He al­so said there will be reg­u­lar­i­sa­tion of the fish­ing in­dus­try as new leg­is­la­tion will be brought to Par­lia­ment.