Land and the poor man

Sep 30, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Land ownership is a contentious issue in Guyana. A land court had to be established to deal with land disputes and ownership issues.
There is a hunger for land in Guyana. Farmers want land to plant. Some want to hold it to flip it over later at a super-high profit. The tax system is no discouragement to this form of skyscraper-styled speculation.
Land is also a class issue. Those with access to land, good lands, often are the ones who are economically superior. Guyana is not the exception in this regard. This is true in Guyana as it is elsewhere.
The government has appointed a Lands Commission to make proposals on how to settle land issues, including the thorny issue of African ancestral land. The present land commission is burdened with a mission impossible. It really will find itself in a quagmire over ancestral lands which were bought collectively; that is where no individual titles were given.
The commission, instead of solving problems, seems to be disturbing a hornet’s nest. Land claims which date back decades are being resurrected. One man turned up with a transport showing that his ancestors had purchased a village. That village might have to be renamed if a recommendation is made to hand it over to the man with the transport.
Another man turned up and claimed that thousands of acres of land were confiscated from him during the construction of a major irrigation system. The Commission is only required to take the complaints and to make recommendations on how land issues are to be resolved. The Commission itself will not resolve these issues. It will not take away peoples’ land; that has always been the job of high-handed government.
But because of the nature of land disputes in Guyana, this Commission is going to be damned if it does and damned for what it does not. Those persons on the Commission should have had second thoughts about being on that commission.
The work of the commission will not change the profile of landownership in Guyana, It is only government which can do that and all governments –PNC and PPP – have been circumspect in placing lands in the hands of the poor, because the poor does not have the resources to work the land and they end up either leaving the land idle or leasing them to rich farmers.
We have to ask ourselves who owns the lands in this country? When the PPP/C first came into office, it claimed that it had inherited from the PNC a situation in which 70% of the lands in Guyana were owned by five per cent of the population. In other words, Burnham’s policy of land to the tiller was an empty promise. It was rhetoric. It was the PNC which created a powerful landed oligarchy in Guyana. It is back in power and it is doing so again.
It is now clear how much the situation that the PPP/C came and met has changed in the 23 years that the PPP/C was in office. What is clear is that prime lands have been given out. There are reports that waterfront lands are now hardly available on both the east and west banks of the Demerara and Berbice Rivers. So who got these lands and what are they doing with them?
This is why a Commission of Inquiry into land ownership is required to determine just how much the PPP/C transformed the ownership of lands. A COI is needed to investigate land ownership in Guyana to determine whether it is still concentrated in a small amount of persons, some of whom may have enough land already.
In Berbice there is a rumour that a private land owning family has intentions of selling their lands because their children and grandchildren are not interested in agriculture. The land holdings of this family are substantial and it is rumoured that the family is asking for one billion dollars for the land.
Now, can you imagine, in a poor country like Guyana, there are persons holding land worth this amount of money? It is inherently incredulous.
In the city, a few years ago, one businessman owned more than 120 properties, most of which were obtained through auctions by the court. Imagine, one person owning so many properties in the city.
There was a time when the city was zoned into commercial and residential areas. The latter would allow for a small man to aspire owning a property in the city. Right now it is impossible for a small man to even think about owning a property in the city. The rich people are buying up every available property and because of the high prices they are paying, they are forced to covert these properties into commercial lots.
So what is to become of poor people in this country if wealth continues to be consolidated in the hands of a few? A land commission to determine who got what and who owns what must be the basis for developing a policy to redistribute land in Guyana so that there is greater equality.

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