Food security is imperative to every nation and is crucial to any country's economic survival. Small island developing states like T&T are no exception.
From 2011 to 2016, this country spent a staggering $32.7 billion (TT) on food imports—bringing in mainly fruits, vegetables, cereals, dairy, and meat.
In 2017, Agriculture Minister Clarence Rambharat boasted that the food import bill had been reduced by $1 billion (TT).
Farmers continue to struggle in 2019, and this country is no closer to being food secure than it was several years ago.
In this fourth instalment of Guardian Media’s series on global warming, we examine the consequences of global warming on the agriculture sector as farmers grapple with rising temperatures and increased rainfall.
Global warming is the heating up of the earth’s atmosphere caused by carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and other human activities. Climate change refers to the changes happening to the earth because of global warming including rising sea levels, accelerating ice melt in Antarctica, increased rainfall and harsher dry seasons.
Dry weather farming
Rice farmer Richard Singh learned to plant and harvest rice decades ago in the Caroni plains under the watchful eyes of his father.
Singh, who now cultivates his own rice fields, spoke about the struggles he faced and the hard decisions he has been forced to make.
Due to the location of his land, every time the Caroni River bursts its banks, Singh’s field is flooded out and crops are affected. Likewise, when the dry season comes around and the river dries up, Singh is left without water for his crops.
Last October when torrential rainfall caused widespread flooding across the country, his losses were huge.
"When the flood came last year, I lost about 250 acres of rice and about 15 acres of vegetables, plus all of my equipment was under water—my spray cans, my blower, the pumps, the harvester, it cost me thousands to repair all of those things, plus I lost all my crops," Singh said.
This year, he planted rice on a very small plot of land, hoping to get seeds for replanting in 2020.
He is also trying his hand at corn and hopes that he can get enough water to harvest this crop.
"I am trying to do the vegetable farming during the dry season and if I do have to plant crops in the rainy season, I will try to plant crops that can take the excess water when it floods," he said. "With the weather patterns changing it is becoming even more difficult to do farming in the dry season because, in the rainy season, you are getting too much water, and in the dry season, you don’t have enough water."
He said after his losses, he has decided that none of his three children will follow in his footsteps and get involved in agriculture.
"I told my children it doesn’t make sense being a farmer, you stand to lose too much and there is no compensation, there is nothing that can be done when your money is washed away or dried up."
Although he said he might try to plant vegetable crops that can withstand floods, Singh said he was still traumatised after last October’s floods.
"The way I feel, I think is the best thing would be only to plant during the dry season, it was so hard to watch all my crops just cover with water and that is not an easy thing to get over."
Fish ponds drying up
Aquaculture farmer Kent Vierra, who rears tilapia in two ponds in Orange Grove Road, Tacarigua, said he believes that climate change has both a good and a bad effect on his business.
"Generally, tilapia being a tropical fish prefers warmer water to stimulate both metabolism and breeding, so they breed more and grow faster in warmer temperatures," Vierra said. "But the downside is that with warmer temperatures, you have evaporation of the ponds and fish can’t live outside of the water. We pump water from another pond into this one but we can’t pump fast enough to make up for the evaporation, we have lost about a foot and a half of water and we haven’t really hit the dry season yet, and that happened over the last month and a half."
The pond that the fingerling tilapia are raised in is over one-third of a mile long and about 100 feet in width.
Vierra pointed to the watermark left when the water began evaporating at a rapid rate in mid-December. He estimates that by the end of the dry season, he will lose more than three feet of water.
"Water is not a limitless resource as we once used to think and once you get evaporation, you always have to be pumping water and adding water, especially at this stage. At this point in time from mid-December to now, we have lost about a foot and a half of water in the main reservoir which is about one-third of a mile long and it is fairly significant in that regard."
In the coming years, Vierra said he will try to learn from whatever hardships climate change brings, so he can continue to operate his business.
"We may have to make the cages smaller in terms of height and we are anticipating to have to find alternative sources for water to continue to run the business in the next decade."
Agriculture economist: Introduce policy change
Agricultural Economist Omardath Maharaj said while water issues are farmers' immediate concern, he believes policy changes at a national level are necessary to save the agricultural industry.
"We can agree that agriculture has suffered from a history of underinvestment and failed policy… and global warming did not start now in 2019, the people in that field of study were warning the world of the issues of the rise of temperature decades ago," he said.
"So we as a small island developing state, our economy, geography, our food production, and agriculture is even more vulnerable, we cannot withstand the shocks—which are what the farmers complain about, too much heat, too much rainfall."
He said there are many other factors that can result from warmer temperatures, including different levels of bacteria, spores, and fungi that promote disease and pests in crops.
"Things like the swarms of locusts, I am not saying they are linked to global warming but it might propel the habitats that facilitate them, it may create a breeding ground for a lot of things that our farmers cannot cope with."
Describing the plight of farmers as a "treadmill", Maharaj said policymakers need to examine the coping methods adopted by farmers to inform policy.
"Farmers now are on a treadmill, they have global warming, they also have praedial larceny, the myriad of things they complain about but somehow we still produce food in this country, which is an amazing feat but all of them are on a treadmill of wanting to produce more food and faster, they want to produce before the dry season or before the place floods."
He said faced with the rapid, increasing changes, farmers often turn to chemical additives that help their plants to grow with less water.
"If we think about that behaviour, what some of them are doing is using more fertilisers, so their crops grow faster or they apply different types of chemicals so the plant is less water-intensive—there are chemical on the market that makes the plants need less water but using all these approaches makes the plant unsafe to eat to some extent.
"Because farmers are being forced to apply different chemicals or different approaches, which the general population may not know is in their food supply, it’s like we know farmers are spraying A, B, C but now they are also spraying D."
Maharaj said farmers may also resort to pumping water from "drains and ravines" for their crops, exposing the public to any disease or harmful chemicals in those watercourses.
"If farmers don’t have water, they don’t have on-farms ponds—if these things are prohibited then there are two obvious scenarios, one is there is going to be a decline in production or the other thing is they will start to pump water from every drain and ravine. But when they start to do that, it exposes us to whatever is in the waters of these drains and ravines."
If authorities cannot understand the farmers’ methods of coping, they leave the public and the food chain at risk.
"We need to understand the coping techniques because that has to inform the policy to protect the food value chain which is what the consumers will be getting to eat eventually."
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State intervention works: The India model
Referencing a trip he made to India to understand agricultural policy changes there, Maharaj said state intervention was able to eliminate decades of deformities and diseases among millions of people by changing the way they practice agriculture.
"For decades, these people used their hands to add chemicals to the plants and there were generations of them with birth defects and skin disorders. When the Government intervened, they actually came up with an 18-day composting method that they taught to these farmers and once the farmers began to practice it on their own, there was no need for the chemical and that eliminated that issue. This is the type of action that we need to see for the survival of our agricultural sector."
Without chemical additives, crops can be classed as organic and therefore bring in greater profit for the farmers.
He believes that a comprehensive change needs to be made to save the local agriculture sector.
"The argument is not only about the over and under absorption of water, it’s not only a water issue there are a lot of underpinnings to it—the farming practices overall, the overall behaviour of people involved in the sector, pests, and diseases or even the way we finance agriculture will eventually have to change, we will have to finance more to mitigate water issues at the farming level."