AGRICULTURE Minister Noel Holder yesterday commissioned a $183M drainage pump at Eversham, Corentyne, Region Six (East Berbice/Corentyne) which will benefit more than 750 farmers from the Black Bush Polder area. Speaking at the commissioning, Holder said Guyana is at risk as a result of both El Niño and La Nina and the pump at Eversahm is installed to deal with the latter weather phenomenon .
He said flooding of the Black Bush Polder can only be controlled by the installation of water pumps. “One of our main goals is to increase production. Farmers can now rest assured that there will be fewer floods.” The minister took the opportunity to encourage farmers to return if they may have abandoned their lands because of constant folds.
The pump which has a capacity of 200 cubic feet per second or 70,000 gallons per minute will provide drainage for 25,000 acres of rice land in Black Push Polder and a similar acreage in the front lands. Funds for the project were acquired through the Indian Line of credit.
Region Six Chairman David Armogan also speaking at the commissioning ceremony noted that on February 2006 when there was widespread flooding along the Corentyne, a decision was taken to cease dependence on gravitational flow for drainage of farming and residential areas. Since then, he noted, pumps have been installed at East Coast Berbice and Rose Hall Town. A similar project is currently being done at Bengal.
“Our drainage system is equipped to take off one and a half to two inches of rainfall in a twenty-four-hour period so if there is more rain than that there is bound to be some amount of flooding but now with this pump we can get the water off the land in a shorter period and farmers are not likely to lose their crops and animals…,” Armogan said.
Water Users Association
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority (NDIA) Fredrick Flatts, said that both rice and cash crop framers will benefit from the new facility and called on all farmers to pay their rates to the Water Users Association, noting that it would cost a lot of money to maintain the pump.
“We will still have some amount of responsibility, for example, to ensure that we do not use this channel as a receptacle for solid waste…At some of the other pump stations we have experienced that problem,” he said.
The project took seven months to complete and was executed by Harichan Toolsie. According to Flatts, the contractor also has similar projects at Bengal on the Corentyne and Gangaram, East Canje.
Head of NDIA Mechanical System Avenish Singh explained that government had undertaken to install drainage pumps throughout the coast of Guyana. To date more than fifty pumps had been installed in Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice.
“The whole object of the exercise is to replace old and undersized pumps and to deploy additional pumps to meet the growing demand in drainage as a result of increased farming acreage under cultivation and to cope with problems being posed by rising sea levels,” Singh said.