Rambharat: State aquaculture too costly

AGRICULTURE Minister Clarence Rambharat said it costs the state ten times as much to rear Tilapia fingerlings than it costs private farmers in aquaculture, speaking in the Standing Finance Committee of the House of Representatives on Monday.

“The state should not be involved in these ventures,” he surmised, lamenting the performance of the Sugar cane Feed Centre (SFC), which he said needs a significant transformation.

Rambharat said the Government’s policy is aquaculture should be driven by private interests, not the state. “The Government will support it in the way we do which is to provide state land at $500 per acre, and technical services.”

Overall, he painted a picture of the gritty realism of the State’s shortcomings in agriculture. Rambharat said his ministry’s pasteurisation unit was a located on a compound inaccessible to dairy farmers and was generally not well thought out. Milk regulations and price controls were not addressed, he lamented.

Rambharat said dairy farmers could make a proposal to run that unit.

Oropouche West MP Vidia Gayadeen- Gopeesingh asked how the SFC was in now in such a state having previously been thriving.

Rambharat replied, “I assure you that pasteurisation unit has never functioned.” The pasteurisation unit had a flawed basis, founded on buffalypso milk.

The buffalypso herd remains infected with the disease brucellosis, so past plans for a milk and cheese industry are now unrealistic, he said, even as alternately he also rejected past suggestions to destroy the whole herd.

Gopeesingh Gayadeen urged more state help for small dairy farmers to help them meet health standards set by the European Union. Otherwise, Rambharat said an audit report spoke to “serious concerns” at the running of the Agriculture Society of TT (ASTT) and the need to clean things up once and for all in the next fiscal year.

The $4 million allocation to the ASTT is to be managed by his ministry with advice from the Finance Ministry, he said.