Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Ravi Ratiram has revealed plans to increase training in agriculture in 2026 with a number of programmes that will be rolled out in the coming months.
Minister Ratiram was speaking exclusively to TTT News following the opening ceremony for the Artificial Insemination Training Programme on Thursday.
“We are going to be launching a new training initiative within the Ministry of Agriculture by bringing the training in the various programmes that have been traditionally offered by the Ministry. But what we see is that we have the Regional Administrative, North Regional Administrative, South, the ETIS Unit, which is the Extension Training Information Services Division within the Ministry of Agriculture, all doing small courses here, there and everywhere based on the requests. So what we have done is sort of bring all the different programmes in addition to new technology in the agriculture sector, under one umbrella, which is the new training initiative that we are working towards.”
Minister Ratiram said it is expected that thousands of citizens will participate in the suite of programmes.
“We have a series of training programmes that we are going to be offering and these programmes are actually going to be executed in all eight counties across the country. So we don’t want anyone to be left behind. We are anticipating approximately 20,000 participants during 2026.”
The Minister said the programmes will assist with this country’s food import bill.
“It is very helpful in terms of our food import bill because livestock is one of the proteins that a lot of our citizens rely upon. So this is also going to help supplement that and see how best we can boost our livestock sector within the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.”
Commenting on the issue of flooding, the Minister said a lot of work was done to clear watercourses in areas where there are agricultural lands. He added that flood relief was also provided to farmers who were affected by flooding in the Aranguez area last year.