The gov­ern­ment of In­dia has do­nat­ed 19,000 kilo­grammes of rice and 12,500 litres of ed­i­ble oil to T&T. The sup­plies were for­mal­ly hand­ed over by In­di­an High Com­mis­sion­er Dr Pradeep Ra­jpuro­hit dur­ing a cer­e­mo­ny at the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture’s head of­fice in Ch­agua­nas on Wednes­day.

Min­is­ter of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries Ravi Rati­ram re­ceived the do­na­tion on be­half of the Gov­ern­ment of T&T. The sup­plies will be dis­trib­uted to needy fam­i­lies across the coun­try.

The do­na­tion was fa­cil­i­tat­ed through the Haryana State Co­op­er­a­tive Sup­ply and Mar­ket­ing Fed­er­a­tion Ltd (HAFED), one of In­dia’s largest co­op­er­a­tive or­gan­i­sa­tions.

Min­is­ter Rati­ram praised the con­tri­bu­tion as more than a hu­man­i­tar­i­an ges­ture, call­ing it “a re­flec­tion of the en­dur­ing strength of In­dia’s co­op­er­a­tive in­sti­tu­tions and their will­ing­ness to sup­port glob­al part­ners in a time of need.”

The ini­tia­tive was co­or­di­nat­ed through a joint ef­fort in­volv­ing the Min­istry of For­eign and Cari­com Af­fairs, the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try, and the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, with lo­gis­ti­cal and stor­age sup­port pro­vid­ed by NAMDE­V­CO.

Rati­ram ac­knowl­edged the com­plex chal­lenges cur­rent­ly fac­ing food sys­tems world­wide, in­clud­ing cli­mate change, sup­ply chain dis­rup­tions, and eco­nom­ic volatil­i­ty.

“These is­sues af­fect our abil­i­ty to pro­duce, dis­trib­ute, and con­sume food safe­ly and sus­tain­ably,” he said.

“But be­yond those chal­lenges lie the sto­ries of re­al peo­ple — farm­ers plant­i­ng with un­cer­tain­ty, small ven­dors nav­i­gat­ing ris­ing costs, and con­sumers seek­ing as­sur­ance about the food on their plates. These are the peo­ple I’m here to serve.”

Rati­ram al­so em­pha­sised the strong and long­stand­ing part­ner­ship be­tween T&T and In­dia, not­ing on­go­ing col­lab­o­ra­tions through the In­di­an Tech­ni­cal and Eco­nom­ic Co­op­er­a­tion (ITEC) Pro­gramme, which has pro­vid­ed train­ing for na­tion­als in ar­eas such as agri­cul­ture, health and gov­er­nance.

“We must treat food safe­ty and food se­cu­ri­ty as cor­ner­stones of na­tion­al and re­gion­al de­vel­op­ment — not as af­ter­thoughts,” Rati­ram added.

High Com­mis­sion­er Ra­jpuro­hit, in his ad­dress, high­light­ed In­dia’s trans­for­ma­tion from a food-im­port­ing na­tion to one of the world’s lead­ing food ex­porters, at­tribut­ing the shift to ma­jor agri­cul­tur­al pol­i­cy re­forms un­der­tak­en in the mid-20th cen­tu­ry.