Agricultural expansion in the Canji Basin without an environmental study is criminal negligence

Dec 08, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor
I am sorry that I am becoming a chronic letter writer, but I am only trying to help.
In yesterday’s Stabroek News I noted that there were questions about Patil and China Paper MOU’s regarding large scale farming activities in the Canji Basin.
As usual the robots on the GuySuCo board have not raised their voices in this matter. I don’t even know if they understand it, at least we have not heard about it from them, but we should have.
I will not deal with the sequence of events which have led to these secret deals, I will allow Dr Roopnarine to do that in Parliament, but I want to suggest caution in their execution, especially since the Stabreok News article tells us that the DY Patil group has advanced beyond an MOU stage and have actually started cultivating 65,000 hectares of land in the Canji basin.
This is a very dangerous situation and I would be very remiss if I did not bring it to the attention of the public.
There is no conservancy in East Berbice, as there is in Demerara i.e the Lama, the MMA in West Berbice, the Boerisiri in the West Demerara and the Tapacuma in the Essequibo. Every village, every sugar estate, every rice farmer including Black Bush Polder draws directly from the Canji River and even today in dry periods the level of the Canji becomes so low that salt water from the Atlantic ocean can intrude as far as where Albion draws water from it, and this includes Rose Hall and Black Bush Polder and everyone in between. In fact, expanding Skeldon without doing an Environmental Impact Assessment study [EIA] on the Canji water system was in itself criminally negligent. And the Skeldon expansion can very well impact on this situation in future, making an already bad situation there worse if it affects Rose Hall, Black Bush and Albion.
And the EPA should have demanded it, if they did it and we do not have any information that they demanded that it be done, since King Jagdeo said that Skeldon must be expanded, we do not have any information on what the findings were. If they did do an EIA and the Government overruled them if the findings were negative, it was a violation of our laws which the government is violating at an unprecedented rate today, and hopes that nobody is looking.
Some years ago the Torani canal was dug to relieve the situation [this was before the expansion of Skeldon] so the problem is known to have existed before the expansion. The ToraniCanal was designed to bring water from the Berbice River to the CanjiRiver to supplement the water requirements of the sugar estates and the rice farmers, including Skeldon, and everyone who takes water from the CanjiRiver for irrigation i.e. all agricultural operations in East Berbice. The Torani Canal can be seen on a Google Earth Map if you put your cursor at 5 degrees 47 minutes 52.67 seconds north latitude and 57 degrees, 31 minutes and 22.76 degrees West longitude running from East to West. No one can tell me what its condition is today. Most people working in Brebice do not even know that it’s there. And I have said it before, when Bharat Jagdeo asked my father, who was a director of Bookers and then GuySuCo from 1953 to 1991 as mechanical coordinator for the industry, what he thought about the Skeldon expansion. His first response was, where would you get the water from? And his second question was where would you get the labour from? I did not understand it at the time, but I do now, so Jagdeo was told that there could be a water problem and a labour problem at Skeldon if he expanded it too much.
Giving out 65,000 acres of land in that area without doing an environmental Impact Assessment study is criminal negligence.
There would only be two solutions to this problem.
1. We can increase the size of the Torani Canal to bring more water from the Berbice River to supplement the Canji, but we have to assess if during the extremely dry weather of a protracted el Nino, whether salt water would not intrude high enough up the Berbice River to enter the Torani canal and contaminate the water of the Canji and halt all agricultural operations in the entire Region; or
(2) That we allow the Berbice River [through the Torani canal] and the Canji River, to run into a reservoir and build a massive conservancy there. But we certainly have not budgeted for that.
Before we enter any MOU with anyone we have to know what the repercussions of all of this expansion will be, and whether the Canj Rriver can take the “load”.
Tony Vieira

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Agricultural expansion in the Canji Basin without an environmental study is criminal negligence

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