Back to the land:

One of the things I look forward to on most weekends is heading to the
market to fill up two strong bags with a variety of fruits and vegetables
grown at home in Trinidad and from other Caribbean islands.
I enjoy the smell of the market – freshly cut watermelons, sweet, fat
golden bananas and plantain bursting at the seams, ginger broken open for a
buyer who wanted “just ah small piece”, the pungent smell of peeled
oranges, over-ripe paw paw – and the sounds of market vendors encouraging
people in dialect to buy from their stalls and the conversations between
seller and buyer who have become familiar with each other over the years.
But for months now, the market is no longer a joy for me. My bags have
gotten lighter, no longer over-laden, where I struggle breathlessly, almost
dragging them to the car.
In one hand, I can now easily hold two bags and I feel sympathy when I open
my refrigerator and see lots of spaces, which otherwise would have been
packed with bodi, melogene, pumpkin, different varieties of spinach, sweet
peppers, tomatoes, cabbage, cassava and other ground provision.
Now, it’s down to a small bag of carrots, a small bag of tomatoes, a small
piece of pumpkin, a skinny lettuce and a few cucumbers.
More than that, I feel a sense of disappointment that I can’t give my
family the balanced and nutritious meals which centrally involve fruits,
vegetables, beans and peas.
And the reason for my food troubles has to do with the astonishing
escalation in the price of fruits and vegetables in Trinidad. It has
reached a point where it is cheaper to buy a medium-sized chicken than to
buy three pounds of tomatoes.
The high price of fruits and vegetables in the country has also driven up
inflation to 9 percent in a one year period between August 2005-2006.
So it was a most welcome decision but a long, long overdue one when prime
minister Patrick Manning placed heavy emphasis during the October 4 budget
on resuscitating the agriculture sector in the new year to help drive down
inflation.
Hopefully, this would not just be a temporary or stop-gap measure but a
serious government policy to allow agriculture to make a permanent
contribution to GDP and in tandem to a host of other social issues as rural
poverty and unemployment.
In the 2006-2007 fiscal year, the Trinidad and Tobago government is again
aiming at reducing inflation to 7 percent but which
will require halving the increase in food prices from between 20-25 percent
where it currently stands to 10-12 percent.
I’ve always felt agriculture began its downhill trend when then Prime
Minister Basdeo Panday in 2001 appointed his long-time political ally,
Trevor Sudama (who later turned traitor but one love between them again) as
the Minister of Food Production.
Instead of seeing it as a major opportunity to get agriculture fired up by
linking the sector to poor, rural families; to a healthy lifestyle; to the
country becoming self-sufficient in food and even finding export markets in
the large US supermarket chains like the food producers in Latin America,
Sudama cynically and cryptically described himself to reporters, as the
Minister of Bhagi (spinach) and Pumpkin.
Many people retorted:” But what wrong with he – that is good food!”
Many more people believed he had belittled the sector which incidentally
was the economic mainstay of his former constituents. Maybe Sudama wanted a
glorified position such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, enjoying the
cocktail circuit!
But those comments to me, was the proverbial straw that broke agriculture
like a blight or a parasite that attacks fruits and vegetables, sucking
their life blood.
The decision by the current government to close down Caroni (1975) sugar
company, which admittedly was a major drain on our treasury, added to the
further deterioration of the sector because many abandoned sugar
plantations were not converted into arable farms while thousands of acres
of orchard fields went into ruin.
I also thought Manning would have linked the revitalisation of the
agriculture sector at home to the region-wide initiative under the rubric
of what is known as the Jagdeo Initiative to give priority attention to
agriculture, to ensure the food security of the region and cut the high
food bill that our countries are facing,
I’ve also discovered, quite unfortunately, that not very many of our
journalists in the Caribbean are aware of the Initiative titled, “A
Framework for Repositioning Agriculture in the Caribbean,” otherwise called
the Jagdeo Initiative.
Maybe it’s because our agriculture ministers return to their countries and
don’t update their national media on agriculture-related issues discussed
at their CARICOM meetings.
I also blame members of the media, in part, for not keeping informed about
the Caricom meetings by visiting the Caricom website or ensuring that their
names are on the email listing to receive speeches, communiques and
statements by contacting the friendly people in the Communications Unit.
Quite recently, the Association of Caribbean Media (ACM) invited
journalists to write a couple paragraphs about the Jagdeo Initiative for
selection to participate in a workshop being held in Nassau, Bahamas.
Many journalists instead wrote the ACM to find out what the Jagdeo
Initiative was all about!
Recognising the role that the media could play in sensitizing their
countries to the importance of agriculture, the Inter-American Institute
for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) hosted the  two-day workshop which
brought together media practitioners, information and public relations
officers to discuss how the communication lines could be opened up between
them.
It was the first workshop of this type that IICA was hosting during their
Caribbean Week of Agriculture and they should be commended for recognising
the media as a powerful medium and a potential partner in getting much more
news on agriculture in our newspapers and the electronic media.
The ACM has put forward some concrete proposals to take the objective a
notch further.
Agriculture is indeed big news, dominating global trade. It is at the nerve
centre of the deadlocked negotiations on the FTAA and also at WTO
ministerial meetings.
IICA has also been promoting a revitalization of the agricultural sector in
the western hemisphere as a double-pronged strategy for poverty reduction
and employment generation.
Dr. Chelston  Brathwaite, IICA’s Director General, speaking during the 6th
Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) described a prosperous agricultural
sector, promoting economic growth, employment and rural prosperity, as a
prerequisite for poverty alleviation and food security because the majority
of the rural poor are in agriculture.
But, he added, for this change to take place, agriculture must be valued
for what it is: the bedrock of society and the cornerstone of any economy.
I hope our Caribbean politicians could also adopt this statement as policy,
because one day the oil and gas, in the case of Trinidad will run out and
the tourism industry that many islands depend on will continue to be
vulnerable to external factors and maybe internal ones such as crime.
So let us value our lands a little bit more.