Shas­tri Boodan

Dis­grun­tled farm­ers in Cen­tral say they are be­ing giv­en a raw deal by the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries.

On Tues­day mem­bers of the Jern­ing­ham Junc­tion Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion met with Cou­va North MP Ravi Rat­ti­ram at his Chase Vil­lage, Ch­agua­nas of­fice.

Di­nesh Bridge­lal, sec­re­tary of the or­gan­i­sa­tion, said there are close to 70 farm­ers op­er­at­ing on 500 acres of land. He said when heavy rains de­stroyed their crops in No­vem­ber last year, they ap­plied for com­pen­sa­tion from the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture on­ly to be blanked.

Bridge­lal said farm­ers may have lost mil­lions of dol­lars in crops. Cit­ing an ex­am­ple, he said an acre of cu­cum­ber can cost around $50,000 to pro­duce. He said “Af­ter we heard the Min­is­ter (of Agri­cul­ture) in Par­lia­ment say that all who have land, all who were af­fect­ed by the floods, be it reg­is­tered or un­reg­is­tered farm­ers, that you could go and ap­ply for a grant.”

Bridge­lal said farm­ers did ap­ply for as­sis­tance to restart pro­duc­tion and a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture showed up two weeks lat­er to as­sess the dam­age. Bridge­lal said farm­ers re­cent­ly got no­tice from the Min­istry stat­ing that in­ves­ti­ga­tors found no signs of flood dam­age.

Bridge­lal said some of the let­ters al­so in­formed farm­ers that they were not the own­ers of the land and can­not ap­ply for re­lief.

Rati­ram, the Op­po­si­tion’s shad­ow for the agri­cul­ture min­istry, said he plans on writ­ing to the Min­istry to re­con­sid­er giv­ing farm­ers some mea­sure of as­sis­tance.

Rati­ram said, “These are the same farm­ers that pro­vid­ed the coun­try with food dur­ing the COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic when we had a lock­down in this coun­try. Namde­v­co would have reg­is­tered all these farm­ers un­der the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture to sup­ply the green ham­pers that the Gov­ern­ment and Op­po­si­tion of­fices were dis­trib­ut­ing across the coun­try.” He said protest would on­ly be tak­en as a last re­sort.

Rati­ram said he would be pro­vid­ing the Min­istry with pho­to­graph­ic ev­i­dence of loss­es and re­ports from Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tions who went in and did as­sess­ments af­ter the flood­ing.”

Min­is­ter of Agri­cul­ture Sen­a­tor Kaz­im Ho­sein was asked to com­ment on this via What­sapp, how­ev­er, he is yet to re­spond.