Acting permanent secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries, Joy Persad-Myers, said yesterday that 3,000 applicants have been awaiting the issuance of agricultural leases by the ministry.
Some of the applicants have been waiting for 15 or 16 years, Persad-Myers said.
Persad-Myers made the disclosure during a Joint Select Committee (JSC) meeting with the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries on land and physical infrastructure.
Addressing the committee’s chairman, Stephen Creese, Persad-Myers said in carrying out the duties of the ministry, they have encountered numerous challenges. Among the issues faced are an increase in residential squatting, the inability of legitimate applicants to receive state lands and issues related to state land tenure.
The ministry has also been grappling with land grabbing by associations and organisations purporting to assign lands for agricultural purposes.
“We have also moved to address over 3,000 files with applicants for agricultural lands. That is what we have been trying to prioritise, disaggregate and attend to. This has been a very painful exercise when we go into the individual files with persons waiting for 15 or 16 years for a simple assignment of lease with things like inheritances and regularisation of persons who have been engaged in substantive agriculture,” Persad-Myers said.
To help clear the backlog and fast track these applications, Persad-Myers said the ministry has re-established the agricultural land administration and publicly advertised to fill the positions of Commissioner of State Lands and Director of Surveys, including other substantive posts “to deal with land grabbing, land blocking and squatting.”
Committee member Franklin Khan said nothing seems to happen in the public service.
“There is a tendency to blame the political directorate.”
Khan described the delay in handing out leases as a “disaster.”
He said the Commissioner of State Lands now has 3,000 files on his desk, while another 7,000 of Caroni 1975 land leases also needed to be dealt with.
To avoid this bottleneck, Khan suggested that Caroni 1976 Ltd could have issued its own leases.
“In an attempt to centralise authority you clog the system,” Khan said.
Khan said the PNM has been focusing its attention on agriculture, which contributes 0.4 per cent to the GPD.
With a $5 billion food import bill, Khan said, agriculture was fundamental.
“If we don’t get land tenure right, agriculture will go nowhere.”
He said the “bureaucracy” in the system should not stop the farming process.
“At the end of the day you have to convince this committee that you are putting systems in place to regularise tenancy,” Khan insisted.
Committee member Hafeez Ali said that land tenure issues were hampering the growth of the country’s agriculture.
He said there were 18 steps an applicant had to take before getting a lease, while it takes a minimum of three years before a lease is handed to a farmer.
“So before we could plant a tomato tree we have to wait three years to do that. I think that is unacceptable,” Ali said.
Ali said the three-year waiting period was a moderate timeframe given by the ministry since he knows of individuals in Barataria/San Juan districts that have been waiting for ten years for agricultural leases.
The committee heard that there are upward of 50,000 farmers legitimately and illegitimately occupying state lands in T&T.