Andy Johnson continues his look at issues surrounding the call for a National Food Security programme in Trinidad and Tobago, and a journalism awards scheme aimed at promoting this objective. The first part of this review was carried in the Express on October 15.

ONE of the major stakeholders in the country’s complex apparatus of organisations and groups pledged to contribute to local agricultural development is the National Food Crop Farmers Association. None of its members was present among those attending the launch on October 6 of an Excellence in Agriculture Journalism awards scheme. This looked like a glaring oversight.

The NFFA is known to be at odds with the Government’s policy on agricultural development. Its leading members would say there is no policy in fact. They were decrying what they saw as the Government’s continued soft-pedalling on this issue in the 2010 Budget. They wait for a decision on the Government’s years-old promises to regularise the status of thousands of farmers on substantial acres of lands in various parts of the country. They see the introduction of the mega-farms as a threat to the existence, and the livelihoods of thousands of small farmers, and they are convinced it was the wrong way to go.

Food security for them would be the Government making good on those promises, helping to drive down the cost of fertilisers and other inputs into agricultural production, to do the tremendous amount of work necessary regarding irrigation and access roads in hundreds of agricultural land holdings across the country. To put in place a praedial larcency police network to apprehend and bring to justice the thieves who prey on farmers, making a nonsense of the hard labour involved in rearing crops. Subsidies for farmers would also be a national priority. And a national land use plan which puts the brakes on the alienation of agricultural land for other purposes, including housing, would also be right up there at the top.

By and large, the national farming community is far from convinced that the Government is moving conscientiously to set in train the kind of enabling environment for achieving national food security. Not anytime soon, at least.

John Rahael was Minister of Agriculture in 2003 when the Government decided to offer a total of 14,000 acres of lands formerly owned by Caroni Limited, for the purpose of making farmers out of 7,000 of the ex-workers of that company.

Christine Sahadeo was Minister in the Ministry of Finance with responsibility for the closing down of the company and the transition of those workers into farmers. The report card on progress with this project is dismal. Both these personalities left the Government and retired from active politics at the end of the last parliamentary term in 2007.

In April, 2008, Sahadeo was speaking, in her capacity now as a lecturer in Management Studies at the UWI, during an international conference on Caribbean food security issues. She was a member of a panel during the week-long conference in Port of Spain, organised as part of the UWI’s 60th anniversary celebrations. She said flatly that ’not enough has taken place’ with the ’Caroni Initiative for Food Production’. Among the things she said: Only 326 acres of the total acreage were in any kind of active use by that time, five years later. Of the 7,000 prospective farmers a mere 404 of them were recognised as doing anything with their two-acre plots. Among this number, 241 were engaged in land preparation, with the remaining 163 ’in active crop cultivation’.

The former minister elaborated then on her sense of disenchantment. ’Many of those ex-workers were not farmers and require additional support, to what minimally

has been provided. The lands are not feasible and have high levels of acidity, which requires soil testing and remedial work to determine selection of crop best suited to soil type.’

Pressing ahead, however, the Government has worked out an equation, deciding that 25 per cent of the country’s food consumption requirements must come from local production. And whereas Greg Rawlins said the local consumption of chicken has long been ’way past that’, the issue here is price. At several intervals in the last five years, the Government had threatened to import chicken as a means of driving down prices to increase affordability for local consumers. Rawlins is the country representative for the Inter-American Institute for Co-operation in Agriculture, one of the sponsors of the Food Security Journalism Awards project.

When he announced a programme of Government support for both the local poultry and cocoa industries in 2003, Rahael had referred to figures which said that consumers in Trinidad and Tobago were among the world’s greatest lovers of chicken.

Along with affordability, price and sustainability of supplies, the internationally accepted definition of food security requires that these ’pillars’ add up to ’accessibility for all’. Greg Rawlins says the Government has established ’some specific guidelines’ for achieving this under its National Agri-Business Development Programme. The 25 per cent local production quota is integral to this.

Details in a Draft Strategy for achieving the Food and Nutrition Security objectives being adopted by the Government reveal the requirements for what the Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute has concluded necessary for ’an active and healthy life’. These can be derived from the six basic food groups-staples, vegetables, legumes, fruits, foods from animals and oils and fats.

Prepared by the Trinidad and Tobago Agri-Business Association, the draft strategy has proposed the creation of a ’mega farm’ comprising combinations of some of the two-acre plots given to ex-Caroni workers. This is part of the recommendation calling for an Agricultural Production Strategy also involving a Small Farmers Association, the Agricultural Society of Trinidad and Tobago and other ’large farms’.

It is dated October, 2008, and calls for such farms to grow produce mainly for domestic agro-processing and export markets. ’Emphasis will be placed on corn, fruits, legumes, root crops and intensive and extensive livestock production.

NEXT WEEK: ’Research indicates that the country currently has adequate availability of all the food groups. However, the level of dependency on imported food is at an unacceptably high level’-TTABA