Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj is sat­is­fied with the Gov­ern­ment's fis­cal al­lo­ca­tion to his min­istry be­cause he be­lieves it will go a long way to help re­duce the food im­port bill. Ma­haraj, in an e-mail, said he was con­fi­dent the re­sources pro­vid­ed in the bud­get would help boost the agri­cul­ture sec­tor's con­tri­bu­tion to the Gross Do­mes­tic Prod­uct (GDP). "Food se­cu­ri­ty re­mains a top pri­or­i­ty of the Min­istry of Food Pro­duc­tion as well as the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment. We are com­mit­ted to re­duc­ing the food im­port bill by 50 per cent as well as in­creas­ing agri­cul­ture's con­tri­bu­tion to GDP by 2015," he said. He al­so said Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar had man­dat­ed an in­ter-min­is­te­r­i­al and in­ter-agency com­mit­tee to look in­to defin­ing which com­modi­ties the VAT re­moval pol­i­cy would cov­er. "There re­main a tremen­dous num­ber of items that can be made ze­ro-rat­ed,"?he not­ed," and there al­so ex­ist sit­u­a­tions of in­clu­sion of a few items with­in cat­e­gories but the ex­clu­sion of many, ex­am­ple the juice cat­e­go­ry (or­ange juice and grape­fruit juice to the ex­clu­sion of scores of oth­er juice flavours). This al­so ex­ists with break­fast ce­re­als, sausages, hams, ba­con and canned foods."

He urged farm­ers to take ad­van­tage of op­por­tu­ni­ties giv­en to them. He added: "This will all be fur­ther com­ple­ment­ed by a food se­cu­ri­ty fa­cil­i­ty with Guyana as we es­tab­lish com­mer­cial re­la­tion­ships and agri­cul­tur­al es­tates with a Cari­com part­ner which pos­sess­es an abun­dance of phys­i­cal land space. "All reg­is­tered farm­ers once again are urged to take full ad­van­tage of the Agri­cul­tur­al In­cen­tives Pro­gramme." When the T&T Guardian con­tact­ed Ma­haraj via tele­phone about the cost of the VAT re­moval project he said he had to re­view his files be­fore he could an­swer. He said he would re­veal the cost by to­mor­row. Ma­haraj, how­ev­er, said con­sumers could ex­pect to ben­e­fit from a 15 per cent price re­duc­tion un­til the fi­nal list of VAT-re­moved items was pre­pared. These are: Ce­re­als (on­ly corn­flakes are ze­ro-rat­ed), pan­cake mix­es, pan­cake syrups, jams, tea, cream­ers, flavoured milk drinks, drink mix­es, juices (on­ly cit­rus juices are ze­ro-rat­ed), snacks, cakes, cus­tard pow­der, canned veg­eta­bles, pas­ta sauces, soups/soup mix­es, corned mut­ton, lun­cheon meats, canned salmon, vi­en­na sausages, bat­ter/bread­crumbs, pholourie mix, flavoured rice, cake mix­es/frost­ing, essences, canned fruits, fruit cock­tail, soya chunks/mixed, soya drinks, in­stant oat­meal, sweet­en­ers, may­on­naise, bar­be­cue sauce, pep­per sauce, sea­son­ings, co­conut milk pow­der, mas­sala, sal­ad dress­ing, olives/ca­pers, rel­ish/dill/pick­les, hot chow, french fries, frozen pota­to, burg­er pat­ties, sausages/ba­con, processed meats, hams/sliced, smoked chick­en, smoked turkey, hot dogs, bologna, frozen foods, ice cream, yo­gurts and desserts.