By Raffique Shah
October 01, 2024
Some day last week, several of my one-time associates and long-time friends managed to breach the hurdles TSTT has implanted on my ancient landline to isolate me from what passes for civilisation today. They called to ask if I heard Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley crowing like a “fowl-cock” when he rolled out a new programme his Government was about to embark on, one tag-line proclaiming: “Making agriculture sexy!”
Continue reading Rowley’s ‘sexy’ agriculture
By Raffique Shah
May 30, 2022
In my relatively short lifetime on Earth, and the even shorter time I actively focused on food production, campaigned for food security, and was a member of committees, boards, etc, that, at least on paper or intent, held out hope that here, at last, was a government or a group of influential people who recognised that we faced a critical problem, and they were prepared to take action to halt the slide into starvation, reverse the tide of widespread hunger, only to find that no action followed the lofty pronouncements.
Continue reading Wheat, soy and disease
By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
April 11, 2022
One is always flabbergasted by how democracy functions (or malfunctions) in Trinidad and Tobago. Recently there was a Cabinet reshuffle in the Government. Clarence Rambharat, the Minister of Agriculture, resigned. He expressed his desire to return to Canada to be closer to his family and yet one week later he was named or, as the Express describes it, “rocked back” into power. (Express, April 3.)
Continue reading I am the State!
By Raffique Shah
April 04, 2022
My telephone mysteriously morphed into a Catholic church-type confessional after my column of last Sunday hit the streets, or given the dominance of the Internet in disseminating news, fake and real, likelier after Sunday Express’ online version was read by people who make it a point to stay ahead on the information highway.
Continue reading Stop the land banditry now
By Raffique Shah
March 28, 2022
I believe every word that the former minister of agriculture, land and fisheries, Clarence Rambharat, wrote and uttered with respect to the rampant stealing of State lands by persons high and low, and the refusal, maybe complicity, of others in authority who are empowered to do something about the multibillion-dollar racket to act, as well as his charge that senior public officials and professionals in private practice, from doctors to attorneys, are part of a mafia-like organisation whose members and agents have grown wealthy off this cancerous crime that has overwhelmed the body politic of this nation.
Continue reading Sordid saga of State lands
By Raffique Shah
February 14, 2022
My final focus on food production for now, on cutting back on imports which stand at approximately US$1 billion per year, adds nothing new, nothing that I, and others more qualified than I, have not said before.
In fact, there is hardly anything I can add to this component of the economy since the challenges remain the same they were decades ago, and governments’ responses, likewise, are like a stuck wax record in a digital player—jarring, unintelligible noises that are offensive to the trained ear.
Continue reading Eat smart, beat inflation
By Raffique Shah
February 07, 2022
Eternal optimist that I am, I see opportunities in crisis—and believe me when I tell you I’ve seen crises in my life that most men cannot even imagine. Many do not wish to even go that far, fearing that nightmarish images would materialise into reality and they would remain trapped in a Dante-like inferno forever and ever… don’t ever mention the “amen”. That could render a grim present into an ominous future.
Continue reading ‘Foods’ that kill us not so softly
By Raffique Shah
June 14, 2021
I shall not dwell on the many options we have to produce some of the foods we consume and to reduce our heavy dependence on foreign foods for our survival. Far too many reports have been compiled by committees on this issue.
The fact that we have done very little to alter the food production equation in favour of local content or substitutes is a damning indictment against us all—from consumers who insist on foreign brands to farmers who cultivate or do not cultivate, depending on subsidies from government; from cooks who will not soil their hands preparing ground provisions for meals for adults who will die if they cannot get hold of foreign “fast foods” that are devoid of nutrition but laden with unhealthy ingredients and harmful additives that are addictive.
Continue reading Small exports add up
By Raffique Shah
June 07, 2021
Warnings of food crises post-Covid-19 are dire. According to one study on global food security by the Centre for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), dated March 15, 2021, one year into the pandemic, ‘…at least four countries are facing…famine, …with 13 close behind…’ The study noted that one year ago, the UN World Food Programme executive director David Beasely, warned the UN Security Council of ‘famines of biblical proportions’ and of possibly 270 million ‘people experiencing crisis levels of hunger’.
Continue reading Foods for your table
By Raffique Shah
November 04, 2020
A few weeks ago, in this space, and not for the first time, I made a case for stimulating the production of local foods as a means of reducing our dependence on foreign foods, and in particular, to chip away at the staggering TTD $5 billion per year in foreign exchange that we must find to pay for just about everything we eat and drink. However, I made the mistake of using the headline “Cocoa, Cassava to the rescue”. I was almost laughed out of town by many of my friends and some of my detractors, who chorused: Shah, yuh want to kill we with cassava!
Continue reading Now Dasheen, Callaloo, stir interest