1 week Ago
At a discussion hosted by the Agricultural Society of Trinidad and Tobago (ASTT) last week on the 2024-2025 budget, farmers complained that Government regulations were restricting the country’s local food supply. One farmer said he lost 80 acres of rice when the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA) cut off his water supply because of a permit violation. He had been pumping water from a ravine to grow his crop, but WASA exerts control over all water sources.
According to ASTT president Daryl Rampersad, T&T has the best agricultural incentives programme in Caricom, but many farmers were unable to access benefits due to stipulations such as land tenure or problems getting a farmer’s badge. These regulations could all be streamlined, or even removed entirely, to increase food production. In his 2023-2024 budget, Finance Minister Colm Imbert assured that, “Food security is high on our agenda, and we are redoubling our efforts to change the dynamics of the sector.
Making the agricultural sector tax-free is an essential component of our policy framework.” This is excellent theory, but practice appears to be somewhat lacking. For instance, Mr Imbert declared, “In response to the ageing farmer population, we seek to attract young people.
” He cited three specific projects that had gotten “enthusiastic response” but, if the Government was truly committed to bringing young people into agriculture, it would have reduced the make-work programmes that draw them, especially young males, into less productive activities. For young men with little education and skills, agriculture and construction are especially useful avenues for personal development. In both, they do work where they can see the fruits of their labour, literally so in the case of agriculture, while acquiring practical knowledge.
Farming nurtures an ethos of hard work, innovation, and self-reliance. Yet, even as the Government increased the allocation for the Unemployment Relief Programme (URP) from $274 million in 2022 to over $310 million in 2023, the entire agricultural sector got $1.4 billion.
Unlike URP, however, agriculture contributed over $755 million to the economy, almost 1% of GDP. Moreover, this does not appear to have been accomplished primarily through subsidies, which only give an illusion of productivity, since figures from the Central Bank show that loans for farmers from commercial banks totalled $188 million in 2023. Both Minister Imbert and the farmers have used the country’s food import bill, which crossed $7 billion in 2022, to argue for increased local production.
However, the core goal of all agricultural policies must always be to provide the population with cheap, good-quality food. Subsidising crops or imposing high tariffs on imports only distorts the market, which means that food gets more expensive for everybody. All the Government needs to do to foster growth in the sector is provide infrastructure like access roads and get out of the farmers’ way.
Not only will this ensure that the domestic market is well supplied with the best local produce, but agriculture could actually become a significant foreign exchange earner as well..
