Yes­ter­day's de­ci­sion by the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC), the state provider of sub­sidised hous­ing, to clear pro­duc­tive agri­cul­tur­al lands at two lo­ca­tions may strike many as be­ing a case of the left hand of the ad­min­is­tra­tion not know­ing what the right hand was do­ing. The HDC, which is an arm of the Min­istry of Plan­ning, Hous­ing and the En­vi­ron­ment, un­der­took to clear lands at Mau­si­ca Road in D'Abadie and in Egypt Vil­lage in Ch­agua­nas for the pur­pose of con­struct­ing hous­es. The fact that the HDC chose East­er Mon­day to un­der­take what is a clear part of its man­date must have come as a sur­prise to the Min­is­ter of Food Pro­duc­tion, Vas­ant Bharath, who, with­in the last fort­night, in­di­cat­ed that farm­ers on State-owned agri­cul­tur­al land who had ap­plied for leas­es would be al­lowed to con­tin­ue cul­ti­vat­ing those lands. "Farm­ers who have ap­plied for leas­es and, through no fault of their own, have not as yet re­ceived their le­gal doc­u­ments are en­cour­aged to con­tin­ue en­gag­ing in pro­duc­tive agri­cul­ture."

This seems like an em­i­nent­ly sen­si­ble pol­i­cy po­si­tion for a gov­ern­ment that is sen­si­tive to the need for greater food se­cu­ri­ty to take-es­pe­cial­ly in light of the large amount of mon­ey that this coun­try spends im­port­ing food. The need to in­crease the coun­try's food pro­duc­tion at a time when the price of food es­ca­lates at an an­nu­al rate of over 25 per cent is ob­vi­ous. But what is al­so ob­vi­ous is that the Gov­ern­ment must re­spond to the tens of thou­sands of peo­ple in des­per­ate need of low-cost, state-sub­sidised hous­ing. This need has been dri­ven in the post-In­de­pen­dence pe­ri­od by the so­ci­o­log­i­cal change in the struc­ture of fam­i­lies in this coun­try where­by the ex­tend­ed fam­i­ly, with sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions liv­ing un­der one roof, has been re­placed by the nu­clear fam­i­ly in which chil­dren move out of the par­ents' house. There have been more re­cent per­mu­ta­tions of the nu­clear fam­i­ly in the sin­gle-head­ed house­hold and the "bar­rel" ex­pe­ri­ence in which the moth­er leaves the chil­dren with the grand­par­ent or a rel­a­tive and seeks her for­tune in "green­er" pas­tures.

How does the Gov­ern­ment go about bal­anc­ing the im­per­a­tive of in­creas­ing the coun­try's food pro­duc­tion with the im­per­a­tive of pro­vid­ing more shel­ter op­tions to the thou­sands of peo­ple who need hous­es with run­ning wa­ter, elec­tric­i­ty and a sew­er­age sys­tem? In a per­fect world, the Gov­ern­ment would be able to pro­vide its cit­i­zens with both land for in­creased food pro­duc­tion and the space need­ed to meet the ex­pand­ed de­mand for hous­ing so­lu­tions. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, we don't live in a per­fect world and giv­en T&T's lim­it­ed land size, the choice will even­tu­al­ly come down to ei­ther land for hous­ing or land for food. It would be a trag­ic mis­take if yes­ter­day's bull­doz­ing of pro­duc­tive agri­cul­tur­al lands in Mau­si­ca and in Egypt Vil­lage were to be an in­di­ca­tion that the Gov­ern­ment is choos­ing land for hous­ing over land for food. What the Gov­ern­ment needs to do is put a halt to all de­struc­tion of agri­cul­tur­al crops while it goes about the dif­fi­cult process of de­ter­min­ing which parts of State's hold­ings of land through­out this twin-is­land na­tion should be ded­i­cat­ed to hous­ing and which to food.

This process of de­ter­min­ing the land that is go­ing to be ded­i­cat­ed to agri­cul­ture or hous­ing should be based on a clear and sci­en­tif­ic as­sess­ment of, among oth­er things, the soils, the ac­cess to wa­ter and the prox­im­i­ty to mar­kets. In oth­er words, the lands that are best suit­ed to agri­cul­ture should be ded­i­cat­ed to agri­cul­ture. It goes with­out say­ing that this process of plan­ning should take the oth­er as­pects of the coun­try's fu­ture de­vel­op­ment in­to con­sid­er­a­tion and that the plan­ning process should en­com­pass light man­u­fac­tur­ing and heavy man­u­fac­tur­ing and ex­clu­sion ar­eas in which no pro­duc­tive ac­tiv­i­ties would be al­lowed. And this process of na­tion­al plan­ning must in­volve wide­spread con­sul­ta­tion with all of the stake­hold­ers who may be ad­van­taged or dis­ad­van­taged by this plan­ning process.