Rambharat: Productive farmers won’t be moved from state land

Productive farmers whose farms are on state lands will not be removed, said Agriculture Minister Clarence Rambharat. who once again expressed frustration at the slow pace at which his ministry resolved issues involving land leases.

“All I ask is for public officers to work the hours for which they are paid to work,” he said, adding that people are being made to wait for 25 years and more for the renewal of their land leases.

Rambharat was addressing a farmers’ consultation meeting hosted by the Caroni Central constituency at the Three Roads Development Centre, Preysal, on Monday evening.

He was answering a question posed earlier by Caroni Central MP Dr Bhoe Tewarie about whether farmers who farm on state lands would be removed.

“Government has made it clear, and I, speaking as the minister, said government has no intention of removing productive farmers from state lands.”

However, he said, “There will be cases where productive farmers are on lands allocated for a different purpose, and in those cases these farmers will have to be relocated.”

He said the issue of land tenure had always been a complex one but had been further complicated in 2003 with the closure of Caroni (1975) Ltd, “because the Caroni VSEP brought with it 20,000 new land files, something for which we really didn’t plan going forward in the long term, so even the ministry struggles with the Caroni VSEP.”

He said this was even more complicated as expired leases or leases for regularisation had to be brought before Cabinet for approval, a process which could take between ten and 15 years or in some cases over 50 years.

“I will give you an example of how inefficient the system really is. In the early 1960s a family (name called) were in occupation of a residential parcel of land, and they made an application in the early 1960s for regularisation, and that reached to Cabinet in the year 2000.

“When it got to Cabinet, it was approved, thankfully. Now when it got to Cabinet of course, the original applicant had died and the son was dealing with the application. “And from the 2000 approval, it went to the chief state solicitor for the preparation of the lease. That reached to me again in 2018 and you know what was the issue? In the year 2000, when the instructions went to the chief state solicitor to prepare the lease, the chief state solicitor recognised that there was an error in the acreage – instead of the 10,000 square feet, it should have been slightly smaller, based on the survey plan that the chief state solicitor was working with – and that simple error took 18 years to get back to the minister for the purpose of going to Cabinet to correct.”

He said he would like to meet the officers handling that file to find out why something so simple could have taken so long. He said the problem facing the Praedial Larceny Squad was also an internal one, as it pertained to the security of tenure of the officers, which is supposed to be handled by the human resources department.