Sascha Wil­son

Res­cue of the co­conut in­dus­try is among sev­er­al food se­cu­ri­ty pro­grammes set for the com­ing year, Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath an­nounced yes­ter­day. He al­so told a British-Caribbean Cham­ber of Com­merce (BC­CC) agri­cul­ture and food se­cu­ri­ty fo­rum at Paria Suites Ho­tel, La Ro­maine, that the coun­try was sit­ting on a gold mine in the co­coa in­dus­try and there were unique sell­ing ad­van­tages in crops such as co­conut and pineap­ple. The min­is­ter said the lo­cal co­conut in­dus­try had been 80 per cent dec­i­mat­ed by red ring dis­ease and a bi­o­log­i­cal ex­pert was ex­pect­ed in the coun­try at the end of the year to help treat the prob­lem and save the in­dus­try.

In out­lin­ing ma­jor op­por­tu­ni­ties for growth in the in­dus­try, Bharath re­ferred to Pep­si Co­la's re­cent pur­chase of a ma­jor co­conut plan­ta­tion in Brazil to bot­tle co­conut wa­ter to com­pete against Gatorade. He said the min­istry, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with farm­ers, came up with a list of items they would be fo­cus­ing on, in­clud­ing sta­ple pro­duc­tion where a fur­ther 3,000 acres of land would be made avail­able for rice cul­ti­va­tion, sub­sti­tut­ing cas­sa­va for wheat, and sub­sti­tut­ing ten per cent of flour with cas­sa­va flour. He said the min­istry al­so in­tend­ed to con­tin­ue its pro­gramme of in­fra­struc­ture and in­cen­tives, in­clud­ing cre­at­ing 2,000 re­ten­tion ponds, de­vel­op­ing ac­cess roads, clear­ing wa­ter­ways to re­duce flood­ing and re­fur­bish­ing fish land­ing sites.

Bharath said the gov­ern­ment was of­fer­ing 4,423 acres of land for agri­cul­ture across T&T, com­pared to the last 16 years where a to­tal 1,500 acres of land was dis­trib­uted. He said one of their biggest chal­lenges was get­ting young peo­ple in­volved in agri­cul­ture. Bharath al­so re­vealed that the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion had agreed to em­bark on an ex­er­cise, start­ing next week, to plant bread­fruit and fruit trees in schools across T&T in ob­ser­va­tion of World Food Day.