With an average food import bill of more than $5 billion and global shocks increasing the prices of not just imported food but raw materials to produce food locally, it would not be a surprise if reducing the food bill was one of the priorities of Government in the budget on Monday.
While many strides have been made by Caricom to reduce the food import bill – there’s the plan to cut imports by 25 per cent by 2025 – through the development of support systems in the region, including a series of expos which connected technocrats with farmers and food producers, locally, farmers still struggle. Prices of materials, a lack of equipment and difficulty in accessing support because of bureaucratic policies are keeping farmers – especially those small farmers who occupy less than 20 acres of land and farmers without registration – from producing at their optimum.
That doesn’t mean that the food import bill cannot be reduced, in fact many believe that TT has a local capacity, if not to eliminate its billion-dollar food import bill to bring it down by a significant number.
But farmers need more support. Farmers who contribute significantly to the food basket of the nation but are not registered, for one reason or another, do not have access to support mechanisms like loans and government grants. This is why different bodies in the agriculture industry – from farmers to suppliers to merchants and distributors – all agree that for TT to reduce its food import bill, government must level the field for small farmers.
Macaroni flakes and milk for pigs
When Business Day visited pig and chicken farmer Brian Maturine in Wallerfield, earlier this week, he had just finished storing several gallons of milk in massive water tanks for his pigs. Maturine, whose three-acre farm is home to between 6,000 and 7,000 chickens and more than 100 pigs, has hundreds of mouths to feed, and has concerns about the price of feed.
“All 100 pigs have to eat twice a day,” Maturine said. “I use two or three bags of pellets every day, and about 10 buckets of milk.”
With the price of feed shooting up during covid19, and remaining volatile in light of the Russian/Ukrainian war adding to the shocks in the grains sector worldwide, Maturine, like many other farmers, has to be inventive to ensure his pigs are fed.
“The price of feed sky-rocketed over the covid19 period,” Maturine said. “Pellets were between $90 and $100 before covid19. Now it has gone up to about $130 per bag.
[caption id="attachment_976271" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Brian Maturine, in the background, feeds pigs a mix of cracked macaroni flakes and milk at his farm in Wallerfield. - ANGELO MARCELLE[/caption]
“Plenty pig farmers learned from before covid19 how to subsidise their feed. They would go to the cracker factory or macaroni factory and buy rejected or left-over produce. I would buy milk that had been rejected because of poor packaging and mix it with the feed and the crackers, and it would make a kind of paste. It’s like cornflakes and milk for pigs.”
The pr
