Caroni lands no good for agriculture: Report

A report done by officials of the Trinidad and Tobago agriculture ministry says it would cost about $140 million to make the two-acre farms allotted to 7,800 former Caroni workers viable for crop cultivation.

And that doesn’t take into account the cost of irrigation. And one official suggested that price tag would suggest that the thousands of small farms that the government is counting on as part of its agricultural reform policy might be heading for failure.

The comments come within days of Prime Minister Patrick Manning saying that these farms have already been created and are producing food.

The warning about the problem is contained in a report dated March 2008 done by soil scientists Seunarine Persad, Ian Rampersad and Hugh Wilson of the Ministry of Agriculture’s Research Division at Centeno.

It studied the Caroni lands over the last two years and concluded that the level of soil fertility has been seriously depleted through a combination of acidity and lack irrigation.

The report suggested that decades of cultivating sugar cane robbed the soil of key nutrients and recommends an aggressive program to use fertilizers and chemicals to enrich the soil.

A government source told the Trinidad Guardian the warning indicates that the Caroni lands would not immediately solve the nation’s food problem, adding that even if Government spends $590 million on roads and drains on the two-acre plots the lands would not be productive unless their fertility is restored.

The official also said since sugar cane did not require irrigation there is no kind of infrastructure on those lands so farmers would have to rely on "rain-fed agriculture" that would not yield the anticipated results.

The findings of the March 2008 report are consistent with soil analyses done in 2004, 2005 and 2007 that warned, among other things, of the acidity level of Caroni Ltd lands.