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Agri­cul­ture and Fish­eries Min­is­ter Ravi Rati­ram has sound­ed the alarm over bil­lions of dol­lars bleed­ing from Trinidad and To­ba­go’s econ­o­my due to a decade-long de­cline in agri­cul­ture. And he has out­lined a plan to re­verse the trend through lo­cal pro­duc­tion and re­duced re­liance on im­ports.

Speak­ing at the open­ing of the Pet Fam­i­ly Store at Icon­ic Plaza in Aranguez on Sat­ur­day, Rati­ram re­vealed that the coun­try’s food im­port bill has surged from $5 bil­lion to over $7.3 bil­lion in the last ten years, an in­crease he sug­gest­ed re­flects both glob­al pres­sures and do­mes­tic pol­i­cy fail­ures.

“What we have seen hap­pen­ing in the last ten years is our food im­port bill would have in­creased from five bil­lion to above sev­en bil­lion dol­lars… about $7.3 to $7.4 bil­lion,” he said, not­ing that the is­sue re­quired far greater na­tion­al at­ten­tion.