THIS was and is the mantra of former President the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan and the political party he founded – the PPP; so, immediately upon accessing office in October 1992 the PPP/C government began a series of restructuring of the various sectors, despite inheriting a bankrupted economy and a devastated socio-infrastructural landscape.
To lay the foundation for a resurgence of investments in the private sector, which Dr. Jagan dubbed ‘the engine of growth,” the first GuyExpo was launched in February of 1994. This catalysed a stimulus in the banking sector, the consequence of a paradigm shift in consideration of loans to new homeowners and small businesses, unavailable and unaffordable before the lowering of interest rates by the PPP/C administration.

Simultaneously, a primary and dire need for homes by grassroots Guyanese engendered the establishment of a Ministry of Housing and the low-income housing drive, which facilitated the home-ownership of  tens of thousands of Guyanese families by the time the PPP/C demitted office in 2015.

Obviously, this truncated the national housing programme and persons whose applications for house lots had not yet been processed, and even those who had never applied for land, unable to afford the exorbitant rents demanded by landlords, began invading state lands and other private properties and building structures to shelter their families.

Squatters have been occupying GuySuCo’s lands at Vryheid’s Lust, Success, and Chateau Margot areas along the East Coast of Demerara (ECD), at great cost to the corporation.
Head of the Agricultural Research Centre at GuySuCo, Gavin Ramnarain, lamented, “We lost around 16,000 varieties of cane which were being evaluated and can never ever be replaced.” These varieties were being planted at the GuySuCo research breeding fields located at Chateau Margot (called the “CM” Field), adjacent to the old GuySuCo fields at Success, where the squatters have settled.

Squatters destroyed the crops which were being studied. The fields occupied by the GuySuCo Research department there are 73 hectares in total and contain some 81,730 varieties under evaluation.

Ramnarain revealed, “Initially, the squatters burnt field CM 44 a few weeks ago with a loss of 420 varieties. This was soon followed by the burning of other fields with a further loss of 16,650 varieties of experimental canes….The department has 31 hectares in cane at this point, it would be a calamity if these were to be burnt.” He said that it takes just less than two decades to produce a commercial variety of sugarcane.

Additionally, the development of the varieties of cane takes about 14 to 18 years; during this time, approximately 100,000 seedlings are sowed and tested and monitored over the years to determine their quality, size, resilience to pests and diseases, and adaptability to the various soil types. This is done to determine which are commercially viable for the corporation.
Ramnarain explained that a “star” variety cane, which is a crop that has proven to be commercially viable, can be responsible for about 25 per cent of the corporation’s annual production, which equates to $2 Billion, explaining, “We do not know how [many] ‘star’ performers were lost in that nearly 17,000 varieties that were put on fire by the squatters, but we can expect we lost a fair few and thereby losing billions of dollars that they would have generated.” Ramnarain lamented that the destruction of these 16,000 varieties represents nearly two decades of data generated, which cannot be replaced also.

However, the housing-the-nation initiative was always a primary priority of successive PPP/C administrations and it is evident that still holds true for the Irfaan Ali administration.
Senior and Junior Housing Ministers – Colin Croal and Susan Rodriques, respectively — have been taking stock of where the need for adequate shelter is most dire. Their visits to Sophia and other squatting areas in order to formulate plans for final resolution of the illegal occupancy of state and private lands met with eager squatters who were reassured by the ministers that, while squatting would not be tolerated, their removal would be executed in a humane way, with the provision of more durable alternative accommodation.

Many times over the past five years the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) and the M&CC forcibly dismantled the illegal structures, which were quickly re-built by the squatters.
However, in view of government’s intention to restart closed sugar estates and re-invigorate the sugar industry, it has become imperative that the squatters be removed from the lands that belong to GuySuCo at Vryheid’s Lust, Success, and Chateau Margot, ECD; but government is committed to ensure that this exercise be conducted in a humane way; thus, the Housing Ministry has begun streamlining the land applications of squatters occupying GuySuCo’s lands.