If T&T’s agri­cul­ture sec­tor has to move for­ward, poli­cies are need­ed for su­per­mar­kets to buy from farm­ers and pri­vate sec­tor in­vest­ment is al­so nec­es­sary to ad­vise farm­ers on agri­cul­tur­al plan­ning as is suc­cess­ful­ly done in St Lu­cia and Ja­maica, says Agri­cul­tur­al So­ci­ety pres­i­dent Dhanoo Sookoo.

This was among rec­om­men­da­tions Sookoo made to Par­lia­ment’s Land and Phys­i­cal In­fra­struc­ture com­mit­tee yes­ter­day.

Co­coa farm­ers in cen­tral Trinidad are ex­pect­ing to ex­port more of the valu­able beans this year.

Thun­der­show­ers drenched most of T&T on Sunday fol­low­ing a scorch­ing dry sea­son, bring­ing gusty winds which top­pled trees and broke branch­es in North Trinidad.

But by mid­day, the T&T Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Of­fice can­celled its ad­verse weath­er alert from yel­low to green say­ing weath­er con­di­tions had im­proved sig­nif­i­cant­ly al­though a few show­ers were still ex­pect­ed to linger in­to the night.

There were no re­ports of any ma­jor dam­age or flood­ing.

In South Trinidad, the rains start­ed around 7 am and last­ed well af­ter mid­day.

Eight farm­ers who were warned by WASA for ab­stract­ing wa­ter il­le­gal­ly - in­clud­ing four who were charged - have all ap­plied for and re­ceived ab­strac­tion li­cences.

Con­fir­ma­tion of this has come from Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Robert Le Hunte, who told re­porters at Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day that “these are be­ing worked on to­geth­er with (ap­pli­ca­tions) for a num­ber of oth­er in­di­vid­u­als and WASA is work­ing close­ly with the re­spec­tive bod­ies to have this re­solved ex­pe­di­tious­ly and am­i­ca­bly so farm­ers won’t be af­fect­ed.”