Agriculture at Trinidad and Tobago's Trade and Investment Convention 2008

Posted May 1st, 2008 by Taran

I was more than a little surprised - pleasantly so - to see the Agricultural Development Bank when I stopped in at the Trade and Investment Convention today. I got enough information to compromise the airway of a small horse from them - as well as a tomato and green pepper plant. The discussions revolved around my own interests in starting in agriculture here in Trinidad and Tobago, and I suppose their interests were more along the lines of helping me figure out what I wanted to do so that maybe they could get around to giving me a loan. I'm trying to avoid loans, of course, but one never knows - so I got as much information as possible from them and will be following up at their South Branch on Cipero Street here in San Fernando, perhaps next week.

I mentioned my concerns about praedial larceny, and I got a few blank stares. It doesn't hurt to ask; it is a problem and one that might have had some form of insurance on it. Apparently this is not the case - but agriculture itself is a risky business, especially with acts of Man and Acts of God. If it were as simple as sticking things in the ground and reaping the rewards, everyone would be doing it and we wouldn't have so much trouble feeding our own species. I'm sure some enterprising insurance company has something on that...

The fish in the aquarium, however, had my attention. Maybe it was the motion, where they were positioned or the fact that they were swimming around in the direction that had run out of coffee earlier that caught my attention, but I ended up chatting with the gentleman who was near the tank. There were tilapia, cascadura and prawns enjoying their field trip to TIC. Very active, perhaps unused to their tank and all the activity around them.

The idea related to aquaculture is simple enough. Dig a large hole in the ground and fill it with water, then throw fish in it. This, of course, sounds a bit too simple - so I asked some more questions and got some fun and interesting stories related to caimans getting into a pond filled with tilapia - and a few ideas related to thieves using cast nets to catch fish while no one is around. The issue of fences and assuring that there were no caimans running amok with the fish became a focus. Following that, I got some recommendations related to the size of the pond needed and how much it would cost to stock the pond. This has a lot of potential for me, I think, and since the soil on my land is made up of a lot of clay, it makes sense that this would be a possibility to explore. Basically one year of feeding fish could allow them to return the favor afterward - not too bad of a deal. And I most certainly would not starve with a pond filled with fish nearby....

This in my head, I went over to the National Agriculture and Marketing Development Corporation (NAMDEVCO) and ran into Prakash Ragbir, who I taught with at The University of the West Indies School of Continuing Studies. After catching up a bit, I told him what I was thinking of doing and he quickly put together a package for me of information they had laying around, including estimates for the costs of planting and maintaining crops as well as their profit margins. NAMDEVCO also exports produce, for a relatively small fee.

NAMDEVCO also runs the NAMISTT.com website that gives information on crop prices at different markets. The items Prakash suggested I look most into were pumpkins and hot peppers; I mentioned tilapia but he let that sit there without saying much - a search of the sites doesn't show anything in the way of tilapia. I'll have to dig into that.

Of course, NAMDEVCO does a lot more than I wrote about - if you're interested in agriculture in Trinidad and Tobago, you should really look at the NAMDEVCO website.

And that, of course, leads me to something that I found peculiar about the Agriculture Development Bank as I was surfing around getting as much information as I could, in the spirit of my later conversation with FastForward. The Agricultural Development Bank's information can be found as a subsidiary of the Ministry of Agriculture, but the contact email address ends in 'adbtt.com'. But adbtt.com is a dead site... maybe this is something they will remedy soon?

All in all, I learned quite a bit and just hitting these two booths made the whole trip with only 2 small cups of instant blended coffee worthwhile, though the coffee... well, the coffee is another story...

Another interesting point to all of this is that so much of the information is actually available online - but unless you know what you're looking for, you're pretty much lost. While it is doubtful that more than 1% of Trinidad and Tobago's 12.5% internet penetration are farmers, the fact that the information is slowly snowballing into something useful seems to indicate that despite the inherent bureaucracy, there is some progress in making more information available on the Internet. Balancing that with getting more access to people around the country would be necessary...