SUNDAY 5 NOVEMBER, 2017 – UWI TODAY
11
INNOVATION
“We have to be more nationalistic in our approach,”
says Mr.
Rodney Harnarine.
Mr. Harnarine is a mechanical engineer, an inventor and
builder of machines. For the last ten years he has been a lecturer in
the Faculty of Engineering, a molder of students with an aptitude
or interest in innovation. Before that he was an entrepreneur in
food processing. And he was born and raised in a family of farmers.
Innovation, education, entrepreneurship, food production – if
you have followed the discussions over the past decade and a half
about the needs of the T&T economy you would have heard these
wordsmany times.These are solutions for an economy incarcerated
in its dependence on oil and gas. And for almost his entire life, Mr.
Harnarine has been quietly working and promoting these solutions
both within and outside the gates of UWI St. Augustine.
His approach is deeply nationalistic.
“I want to see Trinidad grow,” Mr. Harnarine says, speaking
from a conference room in the Department of Mechanical and
Manufacturing Engineering. He turned 70 in January of this year
and no longer lectures full-time. He now comes to the campus one
or two days per week.
Mr. Harnarine’s work was featured in the April 2015 issue
of
UWI Today
article11.asp
. As supervisor for students’ final-year engineering
projects, he (and his colleagues) oversaw the development of a
remarkable cache of innovative machinery. There were items such
as a coconut water extractor, a chataigne shredder, a papaya pulping
device and a soursop seed separator.
It was exciting to see the potential in the Department and its
students. But the work was unrecognised, with little support and
little pathway to take it beyond the campus. Mr. Harnarine made
it his mission to change this circumstance.
From 2014 to 2016 he organised three exhibitions of student
projects as a way of exposing their work to the industry. He has
also acted as a liaison between the campus and the manufacturing
sector.
“We graduate 120 students in this department every year,” he
says. “If we could develop five businesses for the year and those five
go out there and are successful they can employ more students.”
At present, like-minded personnel at UWI St. Augustine, both
within the department and the campus administration have made
innovation and entrepreneurship a major priority.
Mr. Harnarine has focusedmuchof his energy ondevelopment
in the food production sector – agriculture and agro-processing.
His ideal is agro-processing based, export-oriented companies that
will revitalise local agriculture and add value to crops.
“We came fromagriculture,” he says. “Agriculture has answers
to a lot of our problems.”
Mr. Harnarine spent his formative years in a rural community
called Agostini Settlement just south of Chaguanas. His family
worked a one-acre plot of land provided by the Ministry of
Agriculture. It was not an easy life.
“On that one-acre plot we used to grow vegetables and rear
animals. We didn’t have water. We didn’t have electricity. Because
our father was a labourer he didn’t have much cash, so when we
went to the grocery he bought the bare minimum. The rest of the
money went to education, clothing and so on for the family,” he
says.
These conditions did not discourage either himor his siblings.
Among them is an accomplished statistician with the Government
of Canada, a senior doctor and of course, Harnarine himself, who
became an engineer in the burgeoning manufacturing industry.
His accomplishments in the field are impressive. In 1973 he
became a project engineer with CARIRI, designing and building
a 200-tonne press for steel pans. From there he moved on to the
The Mechanical World of
MR. HARNARINE
Move over, Kitchen Aid
B Y J O E L H E N R Y
Trinidad and Tobago Bureau of Standards where he developed
standards in automotive and mechanical engineering. Then he
went toNeal andMassy as technical manager, in the days when cars
were being assembled in Trinidad before the rise of the Japanese
automotive industry.
It was in the early 1980s that he first became a lecturer at The
UWI St. Augustine, spending a decade. It was during this period
as well that he saw the changes taking place in the local economy.
He recognised the vulnerability of T&T’s reliance on oil and gas
and the potential of food-based products.
“I kept telling my students there were opportunities in agro-
processing,” he says. “I looked at what Matouk’s was doing. They
were bottling pepper andmauby and shipping themoverseas. I said
why can’t we do this but extend the backward links to agriculture
even further.”
For engineering students eyeing a career in the energy sector,
it was a risk they were not willing to take. So he did it himself.
If you were a youngster in the 1990s you might remember
“Sun Pick,” a juice drink sold in powdered form. It was one
of several products manufactured by Chase Foods Limited,
Rodney Harnarine’s agro-processing company. Chase Foods
was established in 1993, an almost total one-man operation that
manufactured beverages, canned fruits and vegetables, peanut
butter, jams, sauces and condiments for both the domestic and
export markets. Much of the operation’s machinery was designed
and built by Harnarine himself, including a 200-pound capacity
peanut roaster.
During this period as well he became Chairman of the
National Agricultural Marketing and Development Corporation
(NAMDEVCO), an agency tasked with the commercial expansion
of food production.
At its core the idea of Chase Foods was strong. There was
demand for his products both at home and abroad. The banks
approached him to support the venture.There was buy-in from the
groceries and supermarkets. But ultimately, after about a decade, he
had no choice but to sell the company and get out of the business.
There were many reasons, some common to all small or
medium-sized businesses. But there were others that help explain
the almost aggressive malaise that has impeded diversification. Put
simply, there are powerful, well-placed players in the marketplace.
Harnarine calls them“the big fellas”. Any strategy for diversification
in areas such as manufacturing or food production must reckon
with these forces. What kind of impact do they have on the business
environment? How are they influencing economic policy? If the
nation needs its manufacturing sector to grow and earn foreign
exchange and the big fellas need a liberalised trade environment
to maintain or increase profits, how are these interests reconciled?
During that 1990s period many agro-processing business
rose and fell because of the challenges in the environment. It was
the kind of new economic activity that business associations and
policymakers claim to want and they were smothered in a hostile
marketplace.
“We need new thinking but the system does not allow that,”
Harnarine says.
Yet he hasn’t given up. It has been a decade since his return
to UWI and even as his time on campus has been reduced he still
believes in the potential of agro-innovation and the university’s
role in fostering it.
And even with more free time he is still busy. Mr. Harnarine
is an elder in the Presbyterian Church and a member of its various
boards, including those of its network of 75 elementary schools and
five colleges. He’s also still planning new ways to take advantage
of agro-processing opportunities.
“Now that I’mout of the system I will start building machines
and producing,” he says.
After working so hard for so many years, how does he
maintain this pace?
“I grewup on a farm. It was hardwork. It became a part of me.”
Cocoa bean grinder
PHOTO: AMIR ALI
