KEEP CEPEP OUT OF FARMING

The request by some Tobago vendors, following the fall off in availability of agricultural produce in the island, for the Community Environment Protection and   Enhancement Programme (CEPEP) to include farming as part of its activities, is on paper a good idea, but will it work? For farming to be conducted with any measure of success, those involved must be prepared to work long arduous hours and their productivity must be high. In addition modern farming has to be mechanised, for it to be profitable. This introduces the aspect of it being capital intensive which infers the minimising of labour.
 
Even with the capital investment which will be demanded, there is need for a minimum acreage, which can range from 200 to 300 acres to as high as 800 acres, for them to be viable. Admittedly, the extent of the mechanising of the respective farms would depend clearly on the  crops being planted. CEPEP workers do not have a history of productivity. This is because the programme was conceptualised  and put into practice as a “make work” measure to relieve the unemployment problem. CEPEP, after all, is part of the ten days’ family which had its birth in Special Works in the 1950s, and despite the various name changes, whether DEWD, LIDP or URP, is still noted for being unproductive. How can this be changed?
 
In the present circumstances any involvement of CEPEP in farming in the sister isle would result in a sharp increase in the shelf prices  of the crops produced by the programme. There is another side to the equation. Is it possible for the authorities to locate and acquire areas in Tobago with the suitable acreage of arable land? And this, particularly as several large farms were purchased over the years by foreign and domestic investors and many turned into expensive housing estates. Meanwhile, the country has travelled the road before, indeed in 1981, utilising Special Works type labour for farming. Former Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, the late Dr Eric Williams, in the 1981 budget  had spoken of the introduction of a “Food Farm Utilising DEWD Labour.”

He put forward the argument that an earlier White Paper of Agriculture had spoken of the “relative unavailability of agricultural labour featured prominently among the many constraints impeding agricultural development in Trinidad and Tobago.” There was the proposal to have DEWD labour work on a 200-acre pilot food farm to be established.  Williams himself would quote from a report, which had pointed out that “there is a general negative attitude towards agricultural work.” The rest is history and there seems little point in repeating the errors of recent history. Unless of course there has been a drastic change in attitude.