Think of the Garden of Eden and the biblical fields of plenty come to mind. That is the goal which the similarly named farming community on the East Bank Demerara had set itself. It is home to approximately 800 residents of predominantly Indian and Amerindian decent. The community exudes a distinct sense of peace and serenity, encompassing as it does acres of fruit trees, vegetables, ground provisions and livestock. The realization of its potential, however, has, over the years, been hamstrung by a circumstance of chronic official neglect.
When Stabroek Business managed to negotiate the utterly disgraceful access road en route to the farms and homes of the community the residents shared their ‘journeys’ from their previous lives to their Garden of Eden. Farmer, Bissoondial Boopath said that he had been a resident here since “Dr. Jagan’s time” as Premier when cattle owners and farmers living in Bel Air Gardens were relocated. Dr. Jagan, he said, saw Garden of Eden as an appropriate location for farming rather than cattle roaming in urban and sub-urban areas.
Boopath said that initially residents were required to pay rental fees for the lands they occupied but they eventually received certificates of title to those lands. These days they pay only rates and taxes.
Livelihoods in Garden of Eden depend predominantly on cattle and poultry-rearing and horticulture. The community enjoys potable water, light and telephone services.
Boopath, one of the oldest members of the community, has been living at Garden of Eden for the past fifty-three years. He recounted what he considers to be his “days of glory, all those years ago,” he says, when he used to supply more than 300 tons of cane to the Diamond Estate. Then, the cane was moved via the canal that snakes its way from the farmlands to the estate. After the estate had closed in 1989 cattle-rearing and poultry-rearing and vegetable farming replaced cane cultivation.
The need to move farming produce by road has arisen out of the fact that as the community has become more populated a series of bridges have been built across the canal. It can no longer serve as a means of transport and the farm produce must now be moved to market by road.
That is where the trials of the farmers of Garden of Eden begun.
