…working to open up new residential, commercial areas

“THE interest has ballooned in this country for land. People are coming from all walks of life,” Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Guyana Lands and Survey Commission (GLSC) Trevor Benn told the newspaper as he sought to answer the question of how Guyana will deal with the coming spike in business development and population.

Oil production for the country is expected to commence this month, but long in advance, investors have been flocking to Guyana, seeing the prosperity ahead, while local businesses are scurrying not to be left behind as well.

And, with a population of less than a million people expected to take a gradual climb with the arrival of expatriates, land remains crucial for all forms of development. Sitting down on the Guyana Chronicle’s Online programme, Vantage Point, recently, Benn said that approaches from international investors and locals are “a daily affair” at the Commission.
“Our office is inundated with requests for land. We are not able to respond as we would like,” Benn said. Asked why this is so, and the CEO listed a string of issues, many of which date back to management under former administrations. For example, he pointed out that Guyana has not opened up new lands in over four decades. “Some people are still waiting after 15 years for an application to be processed,” Benn said, adding: “That, too, is a part of the problem we face, because we have not opened new land in this country; since the 1970s, we have not opened up new lands. The last time lands were opened up is at the Mahaica/Mahaicony/Abary Agriculture Development project, so there are not new land areas that we can point persons to.”

UPHILL BATTLE

Looking at this in the larger context, and one can see how it has contributed to squatting. This occupying of unowned land continues to affect land administration, as well as the cleaning of canals and road construction projects of the government. Benn said that the GLSC is examining ways in which it can curb the trend of squatting, even as it realises that this may be due, in part, to the lengthy time the Commission has taken to administer land over the years.

In 2018, the Commission had announced its plan to make available some 6,000 acres of residential and commercial lands in the Demerara-Mahaica Region (Region Four).
The total land allocation will represent some 51 per cent of Georgetown’s landmass, and will be designed as an “upgraded Georgetown”, with modern development for residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural purposes. Benn has opted against stating the exact location, to guard against premeditated squatting.

To make more land available, the GLSC is also on a mission of reclaiming the high number of unused leased lands in the country. According to Benn, of the thousands of acres of land along the Soesdyke-Linden Highway which have titles, more than 70 per cent of them are unoccupied. The Commission hopes to step up its efforts to ensure that persons who lease lands are held to their agreement to occupy said land within a certain timeframe, or face penalty. “One of the things we have to be wary of is because people know that there is a lot of interest in Guyana, they’re coming for land, but they are not necessarily ready to undertake the project that they have in mind… They come; they give you a really good project proposal of what they’re planning to do, the cost and where the funding is coming from, but when you dig very deep, there’s a number of issues with the proposal,” he said.

REPOSSESSION CHALLENGES
Benn also believes that the thousands of acres of unoccupied land is due to migration and persons leaving behind lands leased for as much as 50 years. But, even in repossessing these lands, there is a challenge. The CEO said that it costs the Commission every time it has to invest in policing and visitation efforts to the many locations of unoccupied leased lands.
Of his own, he has been encouraging clients who visit the Commission to ensure they are ready and have the capacity to follow through with a project before pitching it to the Commission.

However, the GLSC knows that this is not enough, which is why it has begun to work on the development of a National Land Use Policy, which will examine how the country should proceed with the development of its land.

BROADEN YOUR INTERESTS

Benn said that recent expressions for land have come in for areas such as the oil and gas sector; the hotel industry; housing and agriculture, with the demand in Region Four being “through the roof”. The Commission is encouraging businesses to seek out land outside of Region Four, as new land availability there is unlikely, and if the quality of one’s service is exemplary, the people will follow. Just recently, InterOil Group and Guyana’s Mings Products and Services (MPS) announced a joint venture in the form of a state-of-the-art Oil and Gas (O&G) Shore Base Inc. for Guyana by 2021, which would take up some 330 acres of land along the Essequibo River in Region Three.

Meanwhile, some 700 acres of the now-closed Wales Sugar Estate has been leased by the newly-launched Amazonia Expert Services Ltd (AES) for coconut processing, proof that persons have begun to look outside of the coast. With the remapping of Guyana also underway, Benn knows that the government will soon able to better understand how best to distribute and manage its lands sustainably. More than 70 per cent of Guyana’s land mass is owned by the State and the remapping project will help government agencies, the private sector, farmers and many more to make wiser decisions and improve their services.

Benn explained: “We would like to be able to know where all of our police stations are located; how do you access those police stations…we would like to be able to show where the schools, where the health clinics are located. With this map we hope to be able to have a good comprehensive knowledge of Guyana and where all of its services are located…where is the best place to place government infrastructure; where should we place a new road; which river to place a new bridge across.” The CEO said that infrastructural development, especially, in Guyana has suffered because of the failure of the previous administration to put the same in place.