GIVEN our endowment of rice agricultural lands here in Region Two, it is a matter of commonsense to expand the Aurora irrigation scheme of the agriculture sector and it should be one of the main planks of our development strategy.

Given our resource base, we in Region Two are in a fortunate position to break the cycle of low production and achieve the goal of our economy. Low production is the direct cause of our poverty. We have to change this situation by increasing significantly, and continuing to increase, the acreage for the small man.

But to be able to do this with any measure of success, we have to, first of all, open and develop new and arable lands. We are richly endowed with natural resources in this region, which can create the appropriate base for material prosperity.

We have fertile land, extensive forests, vast mineral resources, mighty rivers, creeks and an abundance of fresh water fish and other marine resources in Essequibo.

We still have far too many hectares of good agricultural land which are either idle or inefficiently utilised in the Aurora and Supernal creek areas.

Apart from the self-sufficiency objective, our policy must be to expand food production for export. In the first place, current projections are that in the years ahead, food prices will rise more sharply than oil prices. But in the wider context, as young farmers of this region, we also have a duty to use our agricultural potential to help alleviate the suffering, which is endemic, in a shortage of food in the world.
It is the government’s duty to attract young farmers to the land and to keep progressive farmers on the land in order to generate surpluses from agricultural activities to finance rural development and to make a substantial contribution to the national economy.
We must urgently, as a government, remove the many problems which have in the past hampered agricultural production. One of the most important of these is the problem of land tenure. We have not yet acted on the issue of ‘landlordism’, nor have we acted on the problem of idle and inefficiently utilised agricultural lands.
However, we must not think only of large, expensive projects. We must identify the areas which require small schemes like Aurora, which can be undertaken by the central government, local government and the community, in collaboration or separately as the circumstances dictate.
Not a single hectare of cultivable land should be allowed to go uncultivated or to give low yields because of the absence of some small facility for proper drainage and irrigation.