Ot­to Car­ring­ton

"A bar­rel of pep­pers is worth more than a bar­rel of oil in T&T. What do you think the Gov­ern­ment should in­vest in?" asked Brent Bas­combe, a young farmer of North Man­zanil­la.A bag of hot pep­pers fetch­es close to US$40 in for­eign mar­kets while the price of crude oil climbed to US$42 yes­ter­day.

Bas­combe, 26, lived in North Man­zanil­la all his life, a rur­al com­mu­ni­ty with not much eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty to pro­duce em­ploy­ment and oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ties.He and oth­er young men in the com­mu­ni­ty have tak­en up the chal­lenge to in­vest in agri­cul­ture.

Bas­combe said in his com­mu­ni­ty there was noth­ing much for youths to do.

"We sit idly by wait­ing but we saw a source to be­come in­de­pen­dent and to as­sist with the cur­rent food cri­sis in our coun­try," he said in a re­cent in­ter­view.

A to­tal of 48 young men have band­ed to­geth­er to make a dif­fer­ence and cham­pi­oning their dreams is the Agri­cul­tur­al So­ci­ety of T&T and pres­i­dent of the North Man­zanil­la Farm­ers Group, Dhano Sookoo.

"I am from this area and I see the youths not be­ing able to be em­ployed and they en­gaged me about get­ting in­volved in agri­cul­ture.

"Some of youths in the area are cur­rent­ly us­ing aban­doned State agri­cul­tur­al lands that has not been in use for over three decades.

"The land was hand­ed out in the 1980s but has nev­er been ful­ly cul­ti­vat­ed and then left aban­doned. Most of the lease­hold­ers have died or mi­grat­ed. Now these young men are re­turn­ing the land to full pro­duc­tion and have got­ten ver­bal per­mis­sion from some lease­hold­ers," Sookoo added.

She said they were al­so re­vi­tal­is­ing the co­conut in­dus­try and were fo­cus­ing on ma­jor food pro­duc­tion. How­ev­er, she added, they were faced with chal­lenges "like ac­cess roads and ac­cess to ponds dur­ing the dry sea­son.

"I must say these young man have po­ten­tial, rather than sit­ting idly. This is some­thing pos­i­tive and it will change the out­look of North Man­zanil­la and cre­ate eco­nom­ic op­por­tu­ni­ties," she said.

So far the young res­i­dents have in pro­duc­tion less than 100 acres of land.They are fo­cused on root and short crops.

An­oth­er young farmer, Steve Har­ri­paul, told the GML En­ter­prise Desk: "Our in­volve­ment in agri­cul­ture has brought hope for oth­er young adults in the area and has shown them there is a way out of pover­ty, in­stead of be­ing idle and in some in­stances head­ing in the di­rec­tion of crime."

Har­ri­paul said once the is­sue of land tenure was ap­proved they would be able to seek fi­nanc­ing for their projects.Most of the young men in the area are cur­rent­ly catch­ing crabs to help bring in rev­enue to pur­chase chem­i­cals and oth­er items for their farms.

Many of the farm­ers are now wait­ing on the rains to re­turn to start cul­ti­vat­ing more crops as they are un­able to sup­ply enough wa­ter for their crops in the harsh dry sea­son.They hope their plight can be heard and are giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to be able to help the coun­try's econ­o­my.