To get in­to farm­ing in Trinidad, you will prob­a­bly have to squat.

Min­is­ter of Agri­cul­ture Clarence Ramb­harat con­firmed as much to Guardian Me­dia.

"A sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of our best farm­ers are squat­ting. We call them recog­nised squat­ters be­cause they are in a pro­gramme of reg­u­lar­i­sa­tion."

The state of agri­cul­ture in the coun­try came in­to fo­cus last Wednes­day when Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said there was not enough land to fa­cil­i­tate a farm­ing in­dus­try on a wide enough lev­el to sup­ple­ment our econ­o­my.

"There are farms around the world that are big­ger than Trinidad and To­ba­go," said Row­ley at the Alutech Re­search and De­vel­op­ment launch in Tamana.

But land tenure con­tin­ues to be a prob­lem­at­ic is­sue the in­dus­try faces. Thou­sands of farm­ers have faced chal­lenges get­ting reg­u­larised, Ramb­harat con­firmed.

"But at the heart of any­thing we do in agri­cul­ture, land tenure is num­ber one. That is my fo­cus. Our most pro­duc­tive farm­ing fam­i­lies are squat­ters or farm­ers (whose) land leas­es ex­pired decades ago," said Ramb­harat.

It has been a long-run­ning is­sue, in 2016, a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee was told that some farm­ers had been wait­ing over 15 years to be reg­u­larised.

Row­ley al­so sug­gest­ed farm­ing did not ap­pear very at­trac­tive to the younger gen­er­a­tion due to the na­ture of the work.

But ac­cord­ing to Ramb­harat, the land is­sue may be the greater turn-off.

"There are new farm­ers - those bold enough to squat," said Ramb­harat, who ex­plained that work had been done to get those farm­ers reg­u­larised, but it was a slow process.

"So far, our work has led to about 500 agri­cul­ture plots be­ing ap­proved by Cab­i­net for lease to farm­ers al­ready pro­duc­ing on those plots and there are thou­sands of files which are at dif­fer­ent stages of progress," said the Min­is­ter.

There were oth­er el­e­ments of bu­reau­cra­cy that need­ed to be ad­dressed.

"More im­por­tant­ly our work to move away from old and large pa­per files is pro­gress­ing well and soon - next Fri­day- I will dis­trib­ute the first elec­tron­ic ac­cess cards which will al­low farm­ers to ac­cess their elec­tron­ic files."

Agri­cul­ture was al­lo­cat­ed $780 mil­lion in Mon­day's bud­get, while it was an in­crease from the $544 mil­lion grant­ed in fis­cal year 2017/2018, it was still one of the low­er al­lo­ca­tions in the bud­get.

How­ev­er, in the wake of the Prime Min­is­ter's com­ments, pub­lic com­men­tary has shift­ed to lack of de­vel­op­ment of the agri­cul­ture sec­tor.

Agri­cul­tur­al econ­o­mist Omar­dath Ma­haraj re­post­ed his ad­dress at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of a sem­i­nar "De­vel­op­ment Pol­i­cy and Plan­ning in Agri­cul­ture" in Chi­na last month, af­ter Row­ley's com­ments last Wednes­day.

In that speech, Ma­haraj stressed the im­por­tance of farm­ing with re­gard to es­tab­lish­ing food se­cu­ri­ty.

"While oil and gas have been the dri­ver of our econ­o­my, ac­cord­ing to lo­cal sta­tis­tics, pri­ma­ry agri­cul­ture al­leged­ly on­ly con­tributes 0.3% of our na­tion­al GDP. The con­tri­bu­tion of the over­all food and bev­er­age in­dus­try is nev­er re­al­ly dis­cussed in re­la­tion to GDP or even non-en­er­gy GDP. "

Ma­haraj told Guardian Me­dia that state of agri­cul­ture could hard­ly be a sur­prise giv­en the lack of fo­cus it had re­ceived.

"It means that af­ter treat­ing the sec­tor this way all these years, of course, there is noth­ing we can im­me­di­ate­ly re­ly on to bol­ster 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple and our econ­o­my," said Ma­haraj.

The food im­port bill has con­sis­tent­ly crossed $5 bil­lion since 2011.

Ramb­harat said there were oth­er fac­tors apart from farm­ing which im­pacts the im­port bill.

"The re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for low­er­ing the food im­port bill rests with food pro­duc­ers and con­sumers. A sig­nif­i­cant part of the food im­port bill is un­con­trol­lable be­cause they are food sta­ples which we ei­ther can­not pro­duce or can­not pro­duce in quan­ti­ties and at prices re­quired," said Ramb­harat.

The agri­cul­ture sec­tor al­so was hit with set­backs due to nat­ur­al dis­as­ters over the past year, a fact Ma­haraj not­ed in his speech.

"My coun­try al­so en­dured an earth­quake re­cent­ly and se­ri­ous flood­ing events in 2017 across the coun­try but both more im­pres­sive­ly dam­aged agri­cul­tur­al ar­eas and in some cas­es, made arable lands in­ac­ces­si­ble," said Ma­haraj.

Ramb­harat al­so ad­mit­ted this made it dif­fi­cult for the min­istry to do as­sess­ments on how much land was avail­able for agri­cul­ture at this time.

"With­out re­li­able da­ta, it is dif­fi­cult to mea­sure progress and bad weath­er twice last year was a set back in time and the mon­ey we spent to as­sist farm­ers to re­cov­er," he said.