Agriculture Minister Clarence Rambharat yesterday announced that staff of his ministry are being relocated to rural areas for easier access to the country’s farming communities.
In addition, he said, laws will be amended so that the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) and the National Agricultural Marketing and Development Company (Namdevco) can be moved to Chaguanas. The minister said these major changes with take place within the next few months as he seeks to position his ministry to advance agriculture in the country.
Speaking at yesterday’s World Food Day celebrations at the Norris Deonarine Northern Wholesale Market, Macoya, Rambharat said staff of the ministry spent too many of their productive hours in traffic. “We cannot have people commuting from Fyzabad to put in a day work in Port-of-Spain when the issues they are dealing with relate to Fyzabad and south west,” he said.
“We are not only moving (the ministry’s head office from) St Clair to Chaguanas, we are moving employees of the ministry into the rural areas, rebuilding where we need to, fixing and expanding where we need to, every rural office of this ministry, so that those workers could work close to where they live and provide the services to people.”
Rambharat said ministry will focus on three things in first year, which have nothing to do with increasing production in cocoa or any commodity. One is improving the structure of the ministry to form “one happy house.”
“In each ministry we have a lot of floaters,” he said, adding that many of the short term employees were “not qualified to work in a ministry that requires technical and specialist support.” He said when those contracts ended in September the Permanent Secretary advised that “we review the staffing requirements in lands, fisheries, forestry and agriculture before we rehire or hire one more person.”
He the ministry will soon be advertising for qualified technical staff who can put ministry in a forward motion.
He said the major issue facing ministry was not so much the food import bill, or increasing food production but focusing on contribution of agriculture and fisheries to household incomes, particularly rural economies.
He said at a recent meeting of senior staff there was “a house full of people, many, many people” but in his discussions to date “no one person could set me right on the future of honey in this country. Not one person could give me a clear direction on cocoa.”
He said the Praedial Larceny Squad is headquartered in Beetham with offices in Curepe and Princes Town and there is “absolutely nothing from Curepe to Toco to Moruga, where all the farming and most likely all the challenges take place.” He said the squad will be transferred to the Ministry of National Security.
The minister said the Agricultural Society “will be made to account for taxpayers money.”
“You will not be put in control of taxpayers funds until you show the discipline to manage it,” he told officials of that organisation.