Richard Lord

Two Gov­ern­ment hous­ing projects at Pineap­ple Smith Lands in D'Abadie and Egypt Trace in Ch­agua­nas are to pro­ceed as planned, de­spite calls for them to be stopped by protest­ing farm­ers. This was re­vealed by Hous­ing and the En­vi­ron­ment Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal, dur­ing yes­ter­day's post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter in St Clair. It was chaired by Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath, who said the mat­ter was dis­cussed in Cab­i­net yes­ter­day.

The Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) sent crews to bull­doze the farm­ers' crops over the East­er week­end to fa­cil­i­tate the com­mence­ment of con­struc­tion of hous­es for cit­i­zens. The farm­ers se­cured an in­junc­tion from the court pre­vent­ing the HDC from con­tin­u­ing to bull­doze the lands. Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar al­so in­struct­ed the HDC to stop the clear­ing of lands pend­ing con­sul­ta­tions be­tween the key stake­hold­ers in­volved. "The ac­tions on East­er Mon­day are re­gret­table, but I want to in­di­cate it is not a mat­ter that some peo­ple make it out to be-a mat­ter of hous­ing ver­sus agri­cul­ture," Mooni­lal said ini­tial­ly.

Asked if he was say­ing the HDC was wrong to bull­doze the lands, Mooni­lal said: "What I am say­ing is that the process was re­gret­table...It was a dis­tress­ful sight for many of us, it is not some­thing that we like to see and I am con­fi­dent we will not see that again." He ad­mit­ted that he was aware of dis­cus­sion on the mat­ter with the HDC and farm­ers and al­so that no­tices were giv­en to the farm­ers to va­cate the lands. Mooni­lal said MP for the D'Abadie/ O'Meara, Sport and Youth Af­fairs Min­is­ter Anil Roberts had al­so in­formed the five farm­ers oc­cu­py­ing the lands that it was ear­marked for a hous­ing project.

Mooni­lal said agri­cul­ture and hous­ing were both crit­i­cal el­e­ments of the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy. He said the Gov­ern­ment had "tak­en note of the com­plaints of the farm­ers." He re­it­er­at­ed that the farm­ers were to be com­pen­sat­ed and re­lo­cat­ed to oth­er lands where their se­cu­ri­ty of tenure would be en­sured.

Mooni­lal said there were more than 126,000 peo­ple who re­quired hous­ing units and that num­ber was ex­pect­ed to reach 160,000 in the next few years. He said he re­ceived al­most on a dai­ly ba­sis let­ters "some­times soaked in tears" from peo­ple seek­ing hous­ing units. "This is a se­ri­ous de­vel­op­ment chal­lenge that we face and we have to con­front (it)," Mooni­lal said. He told re­porters he was con­fi­dent that in the end, both the farm­ers and the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty would ben­e­fit. Mooni­lal and Bharath lat­er met with the protest­ing farm­ers.