Rad­hi­ca De Sil­va

De­spite its small size, T&T is among the top five coun­tries with the high­est car­bon emis­sions world­wide.

But econ­o­mist Dr Ro­get Ho­sein and his team from the Sus­tain­able Un­em­ploy­ment Re­duc­tion Ef­forts group is de­ter­mined to be­gin the process of de­car­boniz­ing T&T by plan­ning fruit trees in open spaces across the coun­try.

The project be­gan to­day at the Pitch Lake fa­cil­i­ty in La Brea. Stu­dents from sev­er­al schools in­clud­ing Ves­signy High School, Na­pari­ma Col­lege, Na­pari­ma Girls High School and Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege as­sist­ed in the ini­tia­tive.

Ho­sein said they chose to plant fruit trees so that cit­i­zens could share in the pro­duce.

“ Fruit trees have the ben­e­fit of pulling car­bon diox­ide out of the at­mos­phere. T&T is the sec­ond-largest emit­ter of car­bon diox­ide in the world and by plant­i­ng fruit trees some ba­sic con­tri­bu­tion can be made to­wards re­duc­ing our food im­port bill which is about US$700- 800 mil­lion per year,” Ho­sein said.

He added, “ If we could bring that down to US$300 mil­lion, we could use that US$500 mil­lion to­wards buy­ing cap­i­tal ma­chin­ery, med­i­cine and school sup­plies.”

He ex­plained that T&T’s econ­o­my will con­tin­ue to shrink so it was up to the peo­ple to put mea­sures in place to be­come self-suf­fi­cient.

“The T&T econ­o­my is not get­ting bet­ter. As a con­se­quence with per­sis­tent neg­a­tive growth, we the peo­ple of T&T, not the PNM and not the UNC but we the peo­ple have to come to­geth­er and do what is need­ed,” he said.

He called on non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions and oth­er civic groups to join forces and do prac­ti­cal ven­tures to help T&T’s growth and econ­o­my.

Mean­while, MP for La Brea Nicole Ol­livierre said the tree plant­i­ng ex­er­cise in La Brea will add beau­ty to the Pitch Lake. She said they al­so planned to plant flow­er­ing trees and plants so as to en­cour­age more hum­ming­birds and but­ter­flies in the area.