The project, to be located at the historic Sevilla House, will be under the chairmanship of Professor Brinsley Samaroo and include the head of the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT), Professor Ken Ramchand.
It will include a Sugar Museum, a Sugar Heritage Village with artifacts from the industry, including rail engines, railway lines, animal driven carts, tractors, harvesters and other obsolete machinery.
The museum will also contain an archive documentation centre which will preserve the records of the sugar industry along with audio visual material related to the country's sugar heritage.
Included with all of it will be a small, functioning sugar mill, sporting facilities, a handicraft and artisan centre, a recreational park, an auditorium, a cultural centre, a multipurpose conference centre, a small guest house, along with a visitor information centre and a restaurant.
In a speech to mark the event Persad-Bissessar said her government intends to make the project a joint collaborative effort led by the Ministry of Tourism, including Caroni (1975) Limited, the Ministry of Arts and Multiculturalism, UTT, National Gas Company (NGC), the University of the West Indies and the European Union.
"This represents an inroad in a sense by my Government into the realm of historic preservation...This project seeks to salvage the buildings once used as the home for the nation’s most powerful, founding industries—that of the sugar industry—buildings once used as the bustling administrative nucleus of the sugar industry," she said.
She said no other industry richly "intertwines our nation’s history of very hard work, of diversity and cultural fortitude than the sugar industry."
The Prime Minister noted that the closure of the sugar industry by the Manning PNM administration in 2003 affected over 9,000 workers and 6000 cane farmers as well as their families.
It also signalled the end "of a very long and historic era of sugar cane cultivation in Trinidad, it also saw the fracturing of the social and economic sugar culture that was profoundly entrenched in the lives of so many of our citizens."
She spoke of the government's land distribution exercise to former sugar workers to continue the agricultural tradition.
"We cannot restore the industry and the livelihood of so many people who were involved in the industry...what we can do is to preserve the great legacy of the hard work of our forefathers and foremothers, of all ethnicities, in this industry.
"We can preserve their legacy of cultural diversity and preservation and we can thus capture, archive, preserve and showcase the remnants of this once great industry and the people who built and preserved it, many of whom are still alive today, so that our children today and those of the future will always know the rich history from which they came," the Prime Minister said.
She urged the committee looking after the project to utilise all the available resources to make the village and museum become a full project of reality.
She said this is just another of the many innovative ways her government plans to find to diversify the economy.
"This project is proof that we can have economic diversification and that it can also be achieved in a manner that preserves our local and regional history and cultural legacy while at the same time propelling our agricultural industry," she said.
"I want to challenge you to make it a success, a place for which our country becomes known internationally, as famous as our beaches, our oil industry and yes, for our Carnival, Divali and so many other items of culture and heritage.
"Let it be a place where our students from primary to university level, and from other places in the world, can come to learn and research that significant era of King Sugar in history.
"Let it be a place where our children and grandchildren will come to reconnect with their past and in so doing, learn deep respect and appreciation for the traditions and contributions of the agricultural sector of our country...
"I want to challenge you to make it a success, a place for which our country becomes known internationally, as famous as our beaches, our oil industry and yes, for our Carnival, Divali and so many other items of culture and heritage.
"Let it be a place where our students from primary to university level, and from other places in the world, can come to learn and research that significant era of King Sugar in history.
"Let it be a place where our children and grandchildren will come to reconnect with their past and in so doing, learn deep respect and appreciation for the traditions and contributions of the agricultural sector of our country...
"It is therefore ours to cherish and keep for as long as our nation lives and may we never forget or forego our sacred duty to do so."
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