The Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) says it strong­ly con­demns the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion's (HDC) de­struc­tion of farm lands in D'Abadie and Ch­agua­nas. In a news re­lease yes­ter­day, the union's pres­i­dent, An­cel Ro­get, strong­ly con­demned the ac­tions tak­en on Mon­day in D'Abadie, and Tues­day in Ch­agua­nas, where agents of the HDC bull­dozed farm land to make way for hous­ing de­vel­op­ments. Ro­get, in a state­ment, re­mind­ed the Gov­ern­ment about its com­mit­ment to end such ac­tions and drew ref­er­ence to the Peo­ple Part­ner­ship's man­i­festo where food pro­duc­tion and food se­cu­ri­ty were iden­ti­fied as a first pri­or­i­ty to­wards na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment.

He said the HDC's ac­tions "demon­strat­ed the high­est lev­el of dis­re­spect for our work­ing farm­ers and a cal­lous dis­re­gard for our own food pro­duc­tion." Ro­get called on Min­is­ter of Hous­ing and the En­vi­ron­ment Roodal Mooni­lal to ex­plain his pol­i­cy of us­ing arable land for hous­ing. He fur­ther de­mand­ed that Mooni­lal re­veal who gave the in­struc­tions to "bull­doze" the crops. Ro­get said Mooni­lal must be held ac­count­able and must apol­o­gise to all af­fect­ed.

He said the OW­TU stood in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the af­fect­ed farm­ers in de­mand­ing an apol­o­gy from HDC chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Jear­lean John, full and ad­e­quate com­pen­sa­tion, land tenure for farm­ers and the com­ple­tion of the Land-Use and Land De­vel­op­ment Pol­i­cy. Ro­get said the OW­TU was of the opin­ion that food pro­duc­tion was a crit­i­cal as­pect of the coun­try's de­vel­op­ment, which sought to im­prove the qual­i­ty of life for all.