PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Days af­ter farm­lands and sev­er­al crops in Plum Mi­tan were de­stroyed by flood­wa­ters, the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture has con­firmed that work has been done to en­sure pumps in the com­mu­ni­ty which may have less­ened the dam­age are op­er­a­tional.

Farm­ers, who es­ti­mat­ed that they lost mil­lions of dol­lars in de­stroyed crops, told Guardian Me­dia that the pump had no fu­el to push the wa­ter out of their land, all but con­sign­ing their pro­duce to ru­in.

“It’s re­al chaos to know it have a pump in the area to drain out the wa­ter and it’s a poor ex­cuse that they’re us­ing by not sup­ply­ing fu­el,” Nigel Har­ri­ham said as he over­looked his farm­land which was in­un­dat­ed in wa­ter in ex­cess of three feet last Wednes­day.

Har­ri­ham, who grows cu­cum­bers and pep­pers, would have sup­plied those prod­ucts to Namde­v­co. In­stead, he spent much of last week in­spect­ing the land in the faint hope that he could sal­vage any­thing.

His out­look was not pos­i­tive.

“Right now, this sit­u­a­tion, it’s dis­cour­ag­ing farm­ers. As young peo­ple and young farm­ers, we are try­ing to feed we coun­try, try­ing to sup­port we coun­try so that we would have things and now we would have to go and take some­thing to buy some­thing,” he said.

An­oth­er farmer, Narad Sob­ha, was sim­i­lar­ly frus­trat­ed by the sit­u­a­tion, as he es­ti­mat­ed he lost thou­sands of dol­lars worth of crops in the flood­ing, while he al­so paid out of his pock­et to at­tempt to pump the wa­ter out.

“I fed up pump wa­ter, I spend 2,000 and change al­ready try­ing to help my­self to pump out the wa­ter from the land,” Sob­ha said.

When con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries Clarence Ramb­harat said he was aware of the flood­ing and point­ed out that a team from the min­istry had vis­it­ed the com­mu­ni­ty along with the of­fi­cers as­signed to the area. He said his Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Su­san Shur­land was more up to date on the sit­u­a­tion.

When con­tact­ed on the mat­ter, Shurlan con­firmed that the min­istry team had met with the farm­ers and be­tween the min­istry and Namde­v­co, sev­er­al bar­rels of diesel fu­el had been sourced for the pumps, with ten bar­rels de­liv­ered to the area on Fri­day. Shur­land al­so told Guardian Me­dia that fol­low­ing an in­ves­ti­ga­tion from of­fi­cials, they re­alised a sluice gate to al­low the wa­ter to run off had been closed and had to be re­opened. She al­so con­firmed plans to in­stall a new­er pump in the area to as­sist with the runoff of wa­ter.

Shur­land said of­fi­cials were set to re­turn to the area this week to do fur­ther as­sess­ments of the loss­es suf­fered by the farm­ers to en­sure that Flood Re­lief Grant ap­pli­ca­tions can be com­plet­ed and sub­mit­ted so the farm­ers can re­ceive aid in the wake of the dis­as­ter.