Does anybody care?

Does anybody care? It happened in Spring Village and again in Picton Village in south Trinidad. Bulldozers showing up unannounced, destroying crops on lands that had been farmed for years without the courtesy of telling the farmers what was going on.

What was going on in both cases was a government agency was moving in to clear the lands for housing. Read the story about the Spring Village incident. In the more recent case villagers say they have learned that the Estate Management Business Development Corporation (EMBD) authorized the bulldozing of the lands.

Everything was destroyed from food crop plantations to kitchen gardens when the bulldozers went to work on Monday morning. For more than 30 years some of the farmers had worked the land. Nobody wanted it, not even the sugar company that refused to plant canes there.

“It is really a sad thing the way they do things in this country. It is not a pleasant feeling especially when the Government says it wants to plant food,” Fyzool Khan, a retired WASA police inspector told the Newsday newspaper.

He said his father first began cultivating the land in 1962 with approval from Caroni Limited before the sugar company was bought by the government. Nobody ever told him to leave or interfered with his livelihood.

He explained that he has tried in vain to get help and official authorization for using the one-acre plot his family has been cultivating for 46 years. “We wrote to Caroni before they closed down and there was no reply. EMBD said they would get in touch with us but they never did. A year ago, we wrote to line minister Christine Sahadeo and nothing. The letters were all registered so somebody had to receive it,” he told the paper.

Kimbath Maharaj had a similar story of disdain for the farmers. “Twenty-seven years now we making garden here. All the trees were bearing and the place was well maintained. Now everything gone and they didn’t even gave us notice,” he said. He estimates that he lost $100,000 in potential revenue.

His investment in the land included 54 mango trees, 500 pines, 10 coconut trees - all of them bearing fruit.

“The men who were with the bulldozers were taking the fruits from the trees. We stopped them and shared what we could. Now for now everything was destroyed. They knew we were there and they did not even bother letting us know what they were going to do,” he said.

Khan and Maharaj are wondering if anyone would compensate them for their losses.

And then there is the story of Sumintra Sooknanan who has lived there and planted a garden on the land for 18 years.

She has no where to go with her children. "Now I am told that I have to break down my house. I have two kids, a four and five-year-old, and nowhere to go with them. I applied for an HDC house about 10 years ago and nothing ever came out of it,” she cried.

In a nation with overflowing wealth, where a half a billion is going to be invested to host foreign dignitaries for a few days, where a leader spends $140 million for a palatial residence and billions more on skyscrapers that feed political egos, I ask one question: Does anyone care?

Government is building thousands of homes, so why is this woman denied housing without even the courtesy of an explanation.

Food inflation is out of control and thousands are starving while the government boasts of developing an agriculture policy. A government minister tells people to eat plantain instead of rice, to throw out the foreign food for locally grown ones yet bulldozers move in on plantations and destroy farmers' crops.

When the state shut down Caroni Limited it took control of 78,000 acres of land. Surely there are abandoned areas that could be used for housing.

Or is there another reason for the state's action.

Why does Sumintra Sooknanan have to go homeless with her two kids and tear down the home in which she has lived for 18 years?

Why do hard working farmers have to watch the fruits of their labour destroyed?

Does anybody care?