Sto­ry by Sascha Wil­son

and Kellyann Lemmesy

Rio Claro res­i­dents and farm­ers are plead­ing for help from the au­thor­i­ties with a herd of buf­fa­lyp­soes that is run­ning amok in their com­mu­ni­ty, ter­ror­is­ing vil­lagers and de­stroy­ing crops.

Al­though of­fi­cials of the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries said mea­sures have been tak­en to ad­dress this sit­u­a­tion, the res­i­dents com­plained that they have re­ceived no help.

The an­i­mals be­long to the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries’ Mo­ra Val­ley Farm, the largest buf­fa­lyp­so herd in the coun­try. The farm is lo­cat­ed at Guayagua­yare Road near the Rio Claro Food Crop Project.

Res­i­dents es­ti­mat­ed that there were about 1100 an­i­mals on the farm, and be­tween 300 to 600 were roam­ing the com­mu­ni­ty.

They claimed that for years the farm has been in a state of ne­glect but over the last three months, the sit­u­a­tion has be­come un­bear­able. The buf­fa­lyp­so used to roam on­ly at night but are now roam­ing dur­ing the day.

Williams said he had to send his wife and five chil­dren to stay at a rel­a­tive’s house.

“They dis­tress­ing me re­al bad. It come like I am the watch­man here every night, keep­ing them away from the rest of crops,” he com­plained.

“Right now it reach un­bear­able that every­thing gone to chaos. Is about 80 per cent of my gar­den com­plete­ly gone. My gar­den is me, it come like 80 per cent of me gone.”

Williams added: “My fam­i­ly not home be­cause the an­i­mals dan­ger­ous. They ag­gres­sive and it come like they con­quer my whole gar­den right now.”

He said the stench of filth and urine was un­bear­able.

Toolsie Lal, a farmer with the Rio Claro Food Crop Project, com­plained: “We are plant­i­ng gar­den like plan­tain, cas­sa­va and these an­i­mals com­ing in the night and just pass­ing through, butting through, mash­ing down, eat­ing, doh care.”

Lal, who claimed there was on­ly one work­er on the farm with 1100 buf­fa­lyp­soes, added: “When this thing come out it mash­ing, it don’t care. They are dumb an­i­mals you can­not talk to them, you can­not tell them not to go here or not to go there. They com­ing any­where eat­ing and de­stroy­ing it.”

“We ask­ing peo­ple in high au­thor­i­ty to help us. Help the farm­ers, this reach so far that we need the Reg­i­ment in­side of here to get rid of these an­i­mals be­cause they are wild and they are free. They are butting peo­ple’s ve­hi­cles. They are run­ning peo­ple down they dam­ag­ing peo­ple.”

An­oth­er res­i­dent, Ir­win Bridge­lal, said he has lost many crops over the years. He be­lieves the an­i­mals are forced to search for feed be­cause they are not be­ing fed.

Call­ing for im­me­di­ate in­ter­ven­tion by the min­istry, Ramb­horose Seer­at­tan, who lives op­po­site the farm, said res­i­dents and farm­ers de­pend on farm­ing to sus­tain their fam­i­lies.

“Some­body has to do some­thing about it and get some com­pen­sa­tion or some­thing like that be­cause it re­al­ly hard,” he said.

Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries Min­is­ter Kaz­im Ho­sein ex­pressed deep con­cern about the sit­u­a­tion and as­sured that a thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tion has been launched.

In a re­lease, the Min­istry said the in­ves­ti­ga­tion was launched in re­sponse to se­ri­ous con­cerns raised by the com­mu­ni­ty about safe­ty and dam­age to lo­cal agri­cul­ture.

“The safe­ty of our cit­i­zens and the pro­tec­tion of our agri­cul­tur­al as­sets are para­mount. We are tak­ing com­pre­hen­sive mea­sures to en­sure that sim­i­lar in­ci­dents are pre­vent­ed in the fu­ture,” the re­lease stat­ed.

Ac­tion tak­en in­clud­ed the de­ploy­ment of re­gion­al of­fi­cers to as­sess the ex­tent of crop dam­age and eval­u­ate the over­all im­pact on lo­cal farm­ers. The fenc­ing around Mo­ra Val­ley Farm is be­ing re­paired and re­me­di­al work is in progress.

The Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture in­her­it­ed the herd fol­low­ing the clo­sure of Ca­roni (1975) Ltd in 2003.