The prob­lems fac­ing farm­ers in T&T have not changed over the past 50 years.

This ac­cord­ing to for­mer Min­is­ter of Trade and In­dus­try, Vas­ant Bharath, who re­cent­ly sat on the Prime Min­is­ter's Roadmap to Re­cov­ery team.

Speak­ing on CNC3's the Morn­ing Brew on Mon­day, Bharath said the is­sues of wa­ter short­ages, flood­ings and poor in­fra­struc­ture re­main the same for farm­ers.

But he said the in­tro­duc­tion of a $500 mil­lion loan to boost the agri­cul­ture sec­tor could be used to kick­start the in­dus­try and fi­nal­ly bring di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion to the econ­o­my.

"Farm­ers gen­er­al­ly over the last 50 years have been re­al­ly pro­duc­ing what are called cash crops, they go from crop to crop, so they aren't able to go to the bank and get a loan to fund their busi­ness­es or to ex­pand it," Bharath said. "We can ac­tu­al­ly grow five or six or pos­si­bly ten times as much as we do to­day if we were util­is­ing sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy to its full po­ten­tial and we are not, so, there­fore, it makes it very dif­fi­cult for us to com­pete with im­port­ed prod­ucts where our com­peti­tors are ac­tu­al­ly us­ing sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy."

He said T&T faced a se­ri­ous is­sue with food se­cu­ri­ty in the ear­ly days of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic when coun­tries around the world be­gan lim­it­ing ex­ports to en­sure their own food se­cu­ri­ty.

Bharath re­peat­ed his call for an im­ple­men­ta­tion com­mit­tee to be as­signed to the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter to en­sure the rec­om­men­da­tions of the Roadmap to Re­cov­ery com­mit­tee are im­ple­ment­ed.