Politicians can head off property fights – Guyana official

GEORGETOWN, Guyana:

Regional journalists have been urged to educate politicians about the value of land beyond its economic value in order to stem bloodletting, drawn-out court battles, and feuds over ownership rights.

The call has come from Trevor Benn, commissioner of the Guyana Land and Surveys Commission, during a CARICOM region media training workshop.

“The media is very important to our work, but when it comes to land, there is no parallel. People lose lives because of land, and if you eradicate the issues around land, I believe we can reduce a lot of that. ... Land and the work that goes into keeping the land healthy is not very appealing to them, it’s not very sexy. It’s very expensive and it’s process driven, and so they don’t have much to report to the constituency to show what work they do with land,” Benn said.

The workshop was a precursor to the 17th Session of the Committee for the Review of Implementation of the Convention (CRIC) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which got under way at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre in Georgetown on Monday. Some 125 countries are participating in the three-day event, the first such meeting of a subsidiary body of the UNCCD to be hosted by an English-speaking Caribbean country.

CRIC17 will review the first global assessment of land degradation based on earth observation data reported by governments. The assessment, which is based on data provided by 145 of the 197 countries that are party to the convention, shows trends in land degradation up to 2015.

At the end of the session, CRIC 17 will propose recommendations to be considered by its governing body, the Conference of the Parties (COP) during its next meeting set for October 17 and 19 in New Delhi, India.

However, according to Benn, Guyana seems to have missed the boat in land management. “Recently, here in Guyana, we had a case where, at huge cost to the State, a wharf was constructed, and the day after it was constructed, it float[ed] away,” he told the audience.

“We did not have the data to tell us what depth the pile had to be driven. We did not have the data to tell us the type of soil and what type of material to use, and so we continue to pour more into infrastructure that continue to fail because we don’t have the requisite information.”