Thousands of farmers now have security of tenure, and this will transform the agriculture industry.

Norris Deonarine, president of the National Foodcrop Farmers Association, said NFFA completed a 35-year battle to obtain farmer/land regularisation and was able to settle land issues for farmers around the country.

’No longer will farmers be threatened or their lands used for housing,’ Deonarine said.

He said after many years of negotiating with the Ministry of Agriculture, it was finally decided that farmers will pay $200 per hectare for tenured agricultural land.

’We have been hammering with the successive governments, and we have finally been able to get them to see what we have been saying all this time. Farmers have been treated like squatters and that will stop,’ Deonarine said.

The security of tenure on agricultural lands means that farmers now have viable collateral if they need to access loans.

’The farmers can now go to the Agricultural Development Bank and other financial institutions to get funding to improve and upgrade their land and their operations,’ he explained.

He said the overarching threat to agriculture was praedial larceny, but land security will help to alleviate that.

He said farmers will now be able to erect simple security booths on their land and spend time overseeing their crops.

Deonarine said the government was only now recognising how important farming was to the future of a country, and it is hoped that funds will be pumped into research and development to help improve the local farming standards.

’As much as 90 per cent of the seeds, fertiliser and equipment used on a farm is imported. We should become more self-sufficient and start finding a way to do those things ourselves,’ he said.

He also urged the Government not to leave food security to large multinational corporations, who were more interested in profit margins, but to invest the money in the farmers trying to feed the country.