The agriculture conundrum

ANY CRITICISM by me of the Basdeo Panday administration and its leader, however justified, sends the somewhat mendicant Raymond Ramcharitar, surviving on the merciful charity of a conglomerate, into a fit of violent rage and uncontrolled vituperation with the indulgence of editors at the Guardian. His scurrilous attacks would not, however, deter me from putting on record the truth about the abandonment of sugar workers whose backs carried some to political glory.

After the completion of the 2000 sugar crop under my watch with an immense effort which saw sugar production increase from approximately 80,000 tons to 120,000 tons, I went to prime minister Panday in July of that year to discuss an outline strategy for restructuring Caroni (1975) Ltd, release of resources of land and labour for redeployment and investment in non-sugar agricultural endeavours over a six or seven-year period as elaborated in the previous column.

For any proposal to even get off the ground, there was the absolutely unavoidable imperative to engage sugar workers and their representatives in dialogue with the objective of convincing them that it was in their long-term interest to be flexible and amenable to other employment options.

Mr Panday, having taken no initiative for five years regarding sugar workers’ future, dismissed the idea out of hand and instructed me to leave Caroni (1975) Ltd severely alone. After the general election of December 2000, the Ministry of Agriculture was reconstituted as the Ministry of Food Production and Caroni (1975) Ltd was transferred to the portfolio of the Ministry of Industry and Trade under Mervyn Assam, who was to collaborate with Minister of Finance Gerald Yetming on Caroni (1975) Ltd’s future.

In 2003, then prime minister Patrick Manning was in an undue haste to liquidate Caroni (1975) Ltd and summarily retrench all of its workers. This retrenchment was the largest single exercise of termination in any industry or sector in the history of Trinidad and Tobago.

The main reason advanced by the then PNM government was that the company was incurring substantial losses and was a drain on the Treasury to the tune of approximately $150 million to $200 million annually. However, so too were the majority of the other State enterprises incurring losses of hundreds of millions a year.

In addition, the colossal drain on the economy was realised through the make-work programme of the government, such as URP and CEPEP, the many untargeted subsidies and the large number of ill-conceived and ineffective social programmes.

It is therefore a matter of speculation as to the other major reasons for the precipitate closure of Caroni (1975) Ltd.

There was of course the option of restructuring Caroni (1975) Ltd and investment in the infrastructure and operations (with private sector involvement) for non-sugar agricultural activities and redeployment of workers. Such an exercise could have been financed by the value of the retrenchment packages including cash and land assets in excess of $2.5 billion.

The easy option, however, and multi-pronged objectives were to summarily shut down the industry and let the workers fend for themselves with their retrenchment pittances which were quickly dissipated with hardly any alternative employment possibilities.

The decision to close down Caroni (1975) Ltd was monumentally flawed on many fronts. It deprived agricultural development in the country of resources of land and labour.

Of the approximately 3,000 twoacre plots that were distributed, only a minuscule number is currently under some form of cultivation.

The overwhelming majority lay abandoned for over a decade while a few were sold for non- agricultural purposes.

It was and is a phenomenal waste of agricultural land resources as would be the approximately 4,000 t w o - a c r e plots yet to be distributed.

The economics of this distribution exercise was grossly flawed.