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Thursday, July 10, 2025

Food prices set to climb in drought

by

Anna Lisa Paul
2370 days ago
20190112
Flashback October 2018, An Aranguez farmer prepares his garden for fresh crops.

Flashback October 2018, An Aranguez farmer prepares his garden for fresh crops.

ABRAHAM DIAZ

Even as some mem­bers of the pub­lic have be­gun to pre­pare for the up­com­ing dry sea­son which is fore­cast to be harsh and drought-like, one Cunu­pia farmer is con­cerned that not enough ad­vice is be­ing giv­en to agri­cul­tur­al stake­hold­ers who will be among those most af­fect­ed by wa­ter short­ages.

One of T&T’s largest rice pro­duc­ers, Richard Singh, of War­renville, said he had al­ready been forced to scale back rice pro­duc­tion and had be­gun to cul­ti­vate corn in­stead as one way of main­tain­ing a steady in­come.

Singh, who usu­al­ly plants around 300 acres of rice every Oc­to­ber, said he had on­ly plant­ed ten acres so far.

He re­vealed there were var­i­ous strate­gies farm­ers could em­ploy in a bid to con­serve and even re­cy­cle wa­ter, but stressed they were cost­ly with at least one method cost­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars.

“Many of us have the abil­i­ty to store wa­ter but many of us don’t have the re­sources to in­vest in that sort of in­fra­struc­ture,” he said.

Many farm­ers, he said, were al­ready feel­ing the ef­fects of the dry sea­son, Singh said.

“Dur­ing a nor­mal dry sea­son, Ca­roni farm­ers would use wa­ter from the Guaya­mare Riv­er to aid in the ir­ri­ga­tion of crops.”

“We had asked for a pump un­der for­mer Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath (of the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion), to be put in the Ca­roni Riv­er to pump wa­ter through a chan­nel straight in­to the Guaya­mare Riv­er so we would have a con­stant sup­ply of wa­ter.”

How­ev­er, Singh said when the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion as­sumed of­fice, this was stopped and the pump was re­moved.

Singh warned the pub­lic to ex­pect in­creased prices for agri­cul­tur­al pro­duce in the com­ing months and ad­vised home­own­ers to brace for short­ages in lo­cal­ly grown pro­duce.

Agri­cul­tur­al So­ci­ety Pres­i­dent Dhano Sookoo echoed his con­cerns.

“As a coun­try, we are faced with heavy flood­ing as soon as we have one-hour of rain, and as soon as we en­ter the dry sea­son with­in eight weeks or so, we com­plain there is no wa­ter for agri­cul­ture.”

Sookoo said al­though they con­tin­ued to clam­our for a prop­er wa­ter man­age­ment pro­gramme, the rel­e­vant au­thor­i­ties re­fused to heed their re­quests for new poli­cies to be in­tro­duced which would mit­i­gate the ef­fects of wa­ter short­ages for the farm­ing com­mu­ni­ty.

She too urged the pub­lic to pre­pare.

“For ex­treme­ly high food prices and in some ar­eas, the non-avail­abil­i­ty of food.”

“Now with this cri­sis that is ex­pect­ed and the lack of in­fra­struc­ture over the last few years in agri­cul­ture, we are ob­vi­ous­ly go­ing to have to im­port more and this will lead to our food im­port bill in­creas­ing,” she said.

Adding that un­em­ploy­ment in this sec­tor could al­so in­crease as a re­sult of the is­sues list­ed above, Sookoo con­clud­ed, “It is not too late to put things in place now.”

In a bid to con­serve wa­ter, Sookoo ad­vised farm­ers to utilise drip ir­ri­ga­tion sys­tems in­stead of over­head ir­ri­ga­tion; to im­ple­ment a strict wa­ter ex­trac­tion ro­ta­tion to en­sure that all farm­ers would be able to cul­ti­vate pro­duce, and even stag­ger their pro­duc­tion times so there would be a steady sup­ply of pro­duce through­out the sea­son.


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