00:00As Cabinet appoints a Food Security and Food Prices Committee, some stakeholders express
00:06a lack of confidence that it will yield the desired outcomes, as valued input, they say,
00:13has been omitted.
00:14I complained to the minister that we don't have any of the ground forces, none of the
00:19producers in that committee, none of the people who actually, you know, are from the ground.
00:25And he said, well, give them a chance.
00:27And I said, well, I hope that they really achieve what they want.
00:30The 14-member committee is chaired by Nirmala Debesing, CEO of the National Agriculture
00:36Marketing and Development Corporation, NAMDEVCO, and it includes experts in agriculture, economics,
00:44nutrition, trade and consumer advocacy.
00:47On MSJ's Tuesday talk program, President of the Sheep and Goat Farmers Association, livestock
00:54Shiraz Khan says the so-called experts need to take a deep dive into the issues farmers
01:00face daily, which affect production.
01:04People feel that a drought is only in the dry season, but we face a very serious heat
01:09wave from the end of September into November.
01:12And some people lose animals, including myself, and we lose people producing eggs and all
01:19of that.
01:20We lose a lot of farmers.
01:21We lose a lot of birds and so on because of lack of water.
01:23If you could recall, there was a big problem with water availability and all of that.
01:28So I am wondering how deep this committee is going to look into what is this affecting
01:34the production.
01:36Professor Uri Clement has now dipped his feet into entrepreneurship as an agri-processor
01:41of alternative flour.
01:43He says the fluctuation of prices of root tubers presents a challenge.
01:48People are saying, I have a family of five people, how am I going to buy this expensive
01:54flour to feed my family?
01:55And the challenge really is that sometimes the prices of the root tubers, for example
02:00cassava, when we started three years ago, it was $2 a pound, and it went all the way
02:05up to $5 a pound.
02:07And therefore, if I had to make one pound of sweet potato flour, it would cost me $25
02:11just for the raw material alone.
02:13And if we have to get the food import bill down, we need to focus efforts on specificity,
02:20says Darrell Rampersad, president of the Agricultural Society, speaking on a separate program.
02:27What makes up the food import bill?
02:29What consumes the food import bill?
02:31What items on the food import bill can be successfully grown in Trinidad?
02:36What are some of the staples that we consume in Trinidad and Tobago on a daily basis, which
02:41would include rice and flour, of course, sometimes three to four times a day, and
02:45how could we look into increasing the production or manufacturing of such commodities at the
02:52same time?
02:53For Rishi Tiwari, Rupnur Ain, TV6 News.
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