Pres­i­dent of the Sheep and Goat Farm­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, Shi­raz Khan, is con­cerned that the in­crease fines on the pro­duc­tion of vine­gar and co­conut oil is a fur­ther blow to mi­cro en­ter­prise in the agri­cul­ture sec­tor.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Khan called the in­tro­duc­tion of the fees "pet­ty" and saw it as a fur­ther sig­nal of the lack of con­sid­er­a­tion for agri­cul­ture in the coun­try by the gov­ern­ment.

"We al­so face this new thing where farm­ers are tak­ing their co­conuts and mak­ing co­conut oil. They now want to im­pose a tax on that. And I find that it's so pet­ty and pa­thet­ic in the sense that we pay at­ten­tion to how we can tax peo­ple." said Khan, who not­ed this ap­proach was con­cern­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en his crit­i­cism of the pre­vi­ous fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert for his tax poli­cies.