Abstract
The agricultural sector in Trinidad and Tobago is characterized by a labor shortage. A qualitative research design was used to investigate the impact of a national welfare employment program, on the agriculture labor sector. The study recruited n = 19 Community-Based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Program (CEPEP) employees, n = 10 farmers and n = 7 agricultural professionals for in-depth interviews and focus group sessions. A review was conducted of newspaper articles and national budget statements for content related to CEPEP and agriculture. A thematic analysis was conducted to establish themes from the data gathered from the participants and from the media review. The themes emerged were “CEPEP’s benefits to agriculture”, “Labor shortages in Agriculture”, “Convenience Employment” and “Challenges to CEPEP in Agriculture”. The study concludes that welfare employment can be incorporated into the development agenda for agriculture in Trinidad and Tobago once the issues of capacity building, retooling and mentorship, wage adjustments are factored into a structured program.
Highlights
The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has the most industrialized economy in the English-speaking Caribbean
It was the position of Sir Arthur Lewis, a development economist from the West Indies in 1950, that agricultural development must continue alongside industrial development and that “neither can go very far unless the other is occurring at the same time” (Williams & Smith, 2008)
Lewis’ arguments about industrial and agricultural development in West Indian islands some years later can be seen as being ignored. This is surely evident with the low allocations to the agricultural sector over the period under review in the Trinidad economy
Summary
The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has the most industrialized economy in the English-speaking Caribbean. Hosein and Tewarie (2004) in their technical paper on Dutch disease in the wake of a second oil boom in Trinidad and Tobago noted that “ natural resource booms play an important role in helping to alleviate some of the traditional obstacles to development, including; bridging fiscal deficits, savings and investment gaps and providing a rapid inflow of foreign exchange, it brought adverse effects”. One such “adverse” effect may be the consequential shift away from agricultural employment to state funded welfare employment programs or make-work programs as they are locally called.
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