Nadaleen Singh

The Gov­ern­ment plans to pump al­most $53 mil­lion in­to the Min­istry of Food Pro­duc­tion, Land and Ma­rine Af­fairs. This comes from line min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath when he launched "The home gar­den se­ries" which took place yes­ter­day at the min­istry's head of­fice, St Clair Cir­cle, St Clair. "I will cer­tain­ly be ask­ing for more funds than which we were giv­en last year. In fact the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance (Win­ston Dook­er­an) has been very gen­er­ous, I on­ly just got last week fur­ther funds for de­vel­op­ment of 12 fish land­ing sites-$52.95 mil­lion which was grant­ed," Bharath said. Asked whether he was sat­is­fied that the min­istry's in­cen­tives were reach­ing the farm­ers, Bharath said the min­istry and the agen­cies with­in it have more work to do. "I wouldn't at­tempt to tell you that we achieved every­thing we want­ed to achieve. We start­ed on that road and we have been try­ing to get our agen­cies to be more ef­fec­tive," he said.

Bharath said his crit­ics must un­der­stand what "we (the min­istry and the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship) were con­front­ed with two years ago when we start­ed. There is al­ways sig­nif­i­cant room for im­prove­ment, we will con­tin­ue to grow in terms of un­der­stand­ing the needs of our con­stituents or the needs of our farm­ers," he said. The work of en­sur­ing farm­ers get the min­istry's in­cen­tives is an on­go­ing process, Bharath said. Re­fer­ring to fund­ing to op­er­ate the min­istry in an ef­fec­tive man­ner, he said: "We are not go­ing to be per­turbed by the lack of fund­ing in any way. We are go­ing to con­tin­ue with the work we have to do and we will con­tin­ue to go back to Par­lia­ment and to the Cab­i­net for fur­ther funds, as and when we re­quire." The "Home Gar­den Se­ries" is an at­tempt to show the pub­lic how grow­ing your own food can be more healthy and can be done "ef­fec­tive­ly." "We are launch­ing our Home Gar­den Se­ries and the rea­son for do­ing that is to show peo­ple how sim­ple, easy and ef­fec­tive it is to be able to plant your own food at home," he said. Bharath said 12 "how-to" videos have been up­loaded on­to YouTube. Bharath said the min­istry must lead by ex­am­ple and there was need to have a gar­den at the back of the min­istry.