A decision to end sugar cane cultivation in Trinidad & Tobago was taken on Monday when Prime Minister Patrick Manning met with sugar cane farmers.

According to the Trinidad Guardian, Agriculture Minister Jarette Narine who was also at the meeting said that the Prime Minister agreed to shut down the sugar industry when the 2007 crop ends, after the farmers asked him to. He said that Raffique Shah, from the Trinidad Islandwide Cane Farmers Association, was one of the first people to ask for farmers to exit the industry, the Guardian reported.

Mr. Manning has agreed to help give the farmers a soft landing, and also promised, pending Cabinet approval, a $25 increase for this year’s crop.”

However, says the newspaper, one of the farmers’ representatives at the meeting, said Mr. Manning told the farmers that the sugar industry had become a financial burden which the Government could no longer bear.

Mr. Manning reportedly said Government could no longer sustain the industry and drew reference to a TT$47 million subvention given to the sugar industry team last year, and another TT$61 million given to the research extension support services, noted the Guardian.

The farmers had met with the PM to demand, among other things, a contract to supply cane for a minimum of five years and in increase in the price of sugar.

The decision to shut down the industry will impact on some 7,500 farmers and their families but did not come as a surprise to them, as sugar production is not economically viable, taking 17 tonnes of cane to make one tonne of sugar.

According to Mr. Manning in his budget speech late last year, in 2004 primary agriculture provided a little over 1 per cent of the country’s GDP and employed five per cent of the labour force. However, agro-industries accounted for 3.1 per cent of the GDP and 45 per cent of the manufacturing GDP.

He said that as part of the National Agribusiness Development Programme, the Government would establish large agricultural estates to facilitate mass agricultural production in Trinidad and Tobago as either Government owned or joint public-private sector ventures.

The farms, he said, would become the catalyst in the Government’s drive to increase the production of food in Trinidad and Tobago. Commodities to be produced include sweet potato, cassava, yam, dasheen, tomato, ochra, cucumber, pumpkin, eddoes, cabbage, lettuce, green pigeon peas, carrots and string beans.

He added that the majority of these food crops had been identified as the “main suspects” in accelerating the food prices in the markets and supermarkets and helping the cost of living to rise by nearly ten per cent last year.