Dear Editor,
I was given a special invitation by the Prime Minister’s office to attend the commissioning of the Lima pump at 11am and to attend a special meeting with Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo and Minister of Agriculture Noel Holder at 1.30 pm on January 4, at State House to discuss the way forward with rice production and agriculture in Region Two. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend because of sickness. I would have loved to be at the commissioning of the pump since I was born and grew up in Lima, and since I knew the history of my place of birth.
Lima is predominantly a rice-growing and fishing village with large acreages of rice lands stretching from the main canal to the roadside. In 1970, the then Prime Minister LFS Burnham, placed a big 375 horsepower turbocharger Caterpillar pump in this village, not far from where the new Cummings pump was commissioned by Prime Minister Nagamootoo. A delegation of rice farmers met with Prime Minister Burnham and told him that crop after crop their fields and housing areas were flooded when rain fell, and when water was released from the rice lands in the third depth areas, the water would take long to recede from the front lands and they would lose their entire cash and rice crops.
Mr Burnham then had the Caterpillar pump constructed next to the sluice, and after it was completed he came by helichopter to commission it. Thus the farmers’ problems were solved. In 1992, when the PPP took office the Caterpillar pump was removed for some unknown reason, and the farmers and housing areas went back to square one with the flooding of their fields whenever rain fell. The water from the main conservancy canal would also be released to avoid the breakage of the embankment. Thousands of acres of newly sown young paddy and ripe rice were submerged and lost due to the removal of that pump and the closing off of the La Belle Alliance sea defence sluice, and the water kept rising because there was no drainage from Richmond to Hampton Court.
With this new Cummings pump farmers from Anna Regina to Hampton Court will now stand a chance of increasing their paddy production and giving the rice industry a boost for the coming crop.This project which was started by contractor Doodnauth Samaroo under the previous administration, met with some difficulties at the foundation stage; there were several slippages into the sea defence trench which clogged up the main drainage trench leading to the sluice. This caused the young rice seedlings to be smothered, leaving large areas in the field without rice plants.
Many of the Lima farmers’ fields were either abandoned or were producing below capacity because the drainage and irrigation systems malfunctioned and operated inefficiently. We must now ensure that we get real benefits from this new investment in this pump. The government must act urgently to remove the many problems which have in the past hampered agricultural production. They must do so urgently. And they must ensure that the administrative, managerial, financial and other supportive arrangements are established or improved to stimulate massive increases in agricultural production. Low production is the direct cause of our poverty.
We have to change this situation by increasing significantly the national output of goods and services. But to do this with any measure of success, we first of all have to liberate and develop the productive forces.
Yours faithfully,
Mohamed Khan
