Agriculture Minister Clarence Rambharat says Community-based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme (CEPEP) and Unemployment Relief Programme (URP) workers who fall under his ministry will be utilised in defined areas to support the nation’s farmers.
Speaking to the GML Enterprise Desk on the role of his Ministry in light of the Prime Minister’s address to the nation on the state of the economy, Minister Rambharat said he was looking at “restarting the Mon Jaloux Grass Project, to grow grass for farmers across the country.”
He said where there was a particular need from farmers and CEPEP and URP workers can assist then he would utilise them but “it has to be a defined project, that would be the state’s contribution to support farmers.”
In addition he said CEPEP workers can be utilised productively along the 17 miles of coastline in Mayaro “which we have to clean on a daily basis.”
He said they can’t “simply take a CEPEP group and put them into agriculture. The people who will be recruited to work in agriculture are those with the capability to do the work required.”
In his address to the nation on Tuesday the Prime Minister said that CEPEP and URP cost the country $1b annually, but he said he would not cut the programmes, but would instead move to “eliminate corruption and make those programmes more efficient and effective.”
Rambharat said, “CEPEP functions in a limited scope they may do something on the road, but they can’t do minor road maintenance. We have to widen the scope and give them additional resources to do more on site.”
He told the GML Enterprise Desk that on Tuesday both he and Trade Minister Paula Gopee-Scoon toured the Arawak Poultry Plant. The company has 1,600 employees but require more workers. He said the company pays between “$16 to $22 dollars an hour, and a lot of women are employed at the plant, but they need more workers.”
There is, he said, employment outside of CEPEP.
In an effort to meet the demands of the agricultural sector, he said, his ministry plans to revamp Youth Apprenticeship Programme in Agriculture (YAPA) and Agriculture Now —the two programmes for young people to train them in a wide range of skills to make them employable on private farms. We see the opportunity for a two-year apprenticeship for them to learn skills to prepare them for jobs inside and outside the ministry,” he said.
As to the age old cry to “buy local” well Rambharat said “we are doing the research and my approach to it is to identify opportunities for import substitution and to develop some sectors.”
He said “we have to develop the local product not just to grow hot peppers, it has to be a lot more structured approach, timing, packaging, a wide range of issues.” Rambharat said he has put “this responsibility into the hands of the National Agricultural Marketing and Development Co (NAMDEVCO) which is now headed by Dennis Ramdeen.” He said “we have the farms to table concept moving the food from farm to table reducing the middlemen.”
But he has some ongoing concerns about the sector, these include the handling and labelling of food. Issues which he said he intends to address. He told us “in livestock we have food fraud, that is food which is imported in a way that it should not be. Chicken that comes into the country we don’t know how long it was frozen. In the US after 180 days the chicken must come off the shelf, we believe it is dumped in T&T.” He also believes imported pork which competes with the local pig farmers in Wallerfield and Carlsen Field “gets here in breach of conditions under which it is imported.”
He said “we have to level the playing field to make sure the local industry has the opportunity to compete fairly with imported food. We have taken a hard line especially on the imports, we have revisited import of duck meat from Suriname because we not satisfied with the production facilities in Suriname.”
Rambharat said both he and the Minister of Trade intend to meet with the Minister of Health to ensure that the Food and Drug Division enforces the law on importation of meat and other products. He said “it is illegal to import honey but yet all the supermarkets have foreign honey for sale.”
He also wants to meet with the Education Minister to discuss the school feeding programme, because “we have announced that we must approach 100 per cent local foods in the school feeding programme.” The local content in lunch boxes under the programme he said is currently “negligible, it is a lot of imported stuff.”