Richard Lord

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said it would be in­ap­pro­pri­ate for her to com­ment on the farm­ers/HDC con­tro­ver­sy be­fore be­ing briefed by her min­is­ters. She said so in re­sponse to ques­tions from re­porters on the mater at a news con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Lounge, Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port on Sun­day night. Per­sad-Bisses­sar and a T&T del­e­ga­tion, in­clud­ing For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Dr Su­ru­jrat­tan Ram­bachan and Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz re­turned from Brazil on Sun­day night.. Farm­ers' crops at D'Abadie and Ch­agua­nas have been bull­dozed by the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion over the East­er week­end to al­low for the con­struc­tion of hous­es.

The farm­ers are ob­ject­ing to this move, say­ing it was prime agri­cul­tur­al land which should not be used for hous­ing. Farm­ers have been de­mand­ing a meet­ing with the Prime Min­is­ter to re­solve the is­sue, es­pe­cial­ly af­ter last Thurs­day's meet­ing with Hous­ing and the En­vi­ron­ment Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal did not re­solve the mat­ter.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said it would be in­ap­pro­pri­ate to say if she would be meet­ing with the farm­ers be­fore get­ting the de­tails on the mat­ter from her Cab­i­net Min­is­ters, Mooni­lal and Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath. Mean­while, com­ment­ing on her trip to Brazil, the PM said con­sid­er­a­tion was now be­ing giv­en to es­tab­lish di­rect flights be­tween Brazil and T&T. "We need to ex­plore that pos­si­bil­i­ty," she added.

The PM said over the past 12 months T&T had jumped 16 points on the World's Eco­nom­ic Fo­rum Tech­nol­o­gy In­dex. She said the dis­tri­b­u­tion of lap­tops to stu­dents of sec­ondary schools im­pact­ed pos­i­tive­ly on that de­vel­op­ment.