AKASH SAMA­ROO

akash.sama­roo@cnc3.co.tt

Tens of thou­sands of farm­ers can­not ac­cess the many in­cen­tives of­fered by the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture. That’s be­cause a large seg­ment of the farm­ing pop­u­la­tion does not own or are not the ti­tle hold­ers to the land they work on.

Ac­cord­ing to the Agri­cul­tur­al So­ci­ety of Trinidad and To­ba­go, up to 80 per cent of pro­duc­tive farm­ers do not have land tenure ship.

Dur­ing his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance an­nounced a $500M in­jec­tion for the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture tak­ing its al­lo­ca­tion to the bil­lion-dol­lar mark. Con­sid­er­ing Min­is­ter Clarance Ramb­harat had pre­vi­ous­ly said that 75 per cent of its bud­get goes to­wards re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture such as salaries, this one-off al­lo­ca­tion may very well go to­wards de­vel­op­ment.

Cou­pled with the at least 10 in­cen­tives for farm­ers high­light­ed in the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture’s web­site, one may think it is the best time to be a farmer. But with­out land tenure­ship, most of them will not be able to reap its ben­e­fits.

It’s a big prob­lem that’s hold­ing back de­vel­op­ment and growth for young farmer Kay­ma Kenedie.

Kenedie does not own the land he and his fam­i­ly plant their veg­eta­bles on along Mc­Nair Ex­ten­sion in Cunu­pia.

“I am cur­rent­ly in a predica­ment be­cause I don’t get Gov­ern­ment in­cen­tives, I can­not make ad­vance­ments that I want like wa­ter re­ten­tion ponds or help in ac­cess­ing mar­kets to sell my pro­duce such as su­per­mar­kets and ho­tels.”

Kenedie said farm­ing is a risky busi­ness and peo­ple are re­luc­tant to in­vest ful­ly in the in­dus­try.

“No­body will in­vest thou­sands of dol­lars in­to the sec­tor with­out get­ting back any mon­ey.”

He ad­mits that for those who do own their land the process to re­claim what they spend is ex­pe­di­tious. How­ev­er, Kenedie be­lieves the is­sue of land own­er­ship is the biggest hin­drance to food se­cu­ri­ty.

And speak­ing of youth, he said landown­ers are re­luc­tant to rent their prop­er­ty to young farm­ers. A rental agree­ment would help farm­ers ac­cess the ben­e­fits. How­ev­er ac­cord­ing to Kenedie,

“In the sec­tor there is a lot of fraud so per­sons are scep­ti­cal about sign­ing agree­ments with peo­ple be­cause you have per­sons who are land grab­bing and try­ing to change deeds of own­er­ship so that is a hin­drance right there.”

Now, this is not a new is­sue. It is very much on the radar of the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, in fact, yes­ter­day the Min­is­ter said he met with farm­ers in Moru­ga to col­lect da­ta for this process.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to him and he said the min­istry has been mak­ing progress but there is still a lot of work to be done.

Min­is­ter Ramb­harat said while they’re pro­cess­ing ap­pli­cants, they are si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly dig­i­tiz­ing the files. He said of the 30 thou­sand state land files, so far, they’ve on­ly processed one-third of that.

He hopes in two years to fin­ish the re­main­ing 20 thou­sand.

And the min­is­ter said there are about 50 thou­sand files from for­mer Ca­roni Lands and squat­ters still to be processed. He’s hop­ing in this fi­nan­cial year to ac­cel­er­ate work on those files.

Min­is­ter Ramb­harat said he will speak more on the is­sue dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to the bud­get de­bate.