For­mer agri­cul­ture min­is­ter Trevor Su­dama has ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of be­ing sense­less in its de­ci­sion to build a $7.2 bil­lion Point Fortin high­way. He crit­i­cised the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship on Sun­day while ad­dress­ing high­way re-route ac­tivists dur­ing Sun­day's ral­ly at Door­bas­sa Recre­ation ground, San Fran­cique. The event was held by mem­bers of the High­way Re-route Move­ment. Su­dama, who stayed out of the pub­lic lime­light for over a decade, de­nied he "rose from the dead" to sup­port the move­ment in its strug­gle to save 13 com­mu­ni­ties from dev­as­ta­tion. He told ac­tivists to hold strong as the high­way would kill the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor if it was built through the Oropouche la­goon. He added: "They are talk­ing about com­mer­cial ad­vance­ment but they build­ing high­way in low-ly­ing lands. Who will come to put down in­dus­try in low-ly­ing la­goon? They will kill agri­cul­ture once and for all in this area."

He al­so said there would be sig­nif­i­cant loss of in­dige­nous busi­ness­es, dis­lo­ca­tion of hun­dreds of fam­i­lies, cap­ping of oil wells and the de­struc­tion of places of wor­ship. "We must not al­low this. No high­way from Debe to Mon De­sir! Save the peo­ple mon­ey," Su­dama said. He ex­plained that based on his cal­cu­la­tions, the high­way would on­ly save one minute of dri­ving time. Su­dama con­tend­ed that the dis­tance from Debe to Cross Cross­ing, San Fer­nan­do, us­ing the ex­ist­ing SS Erin Road and South­ern Main Road was ap­prox­i­mate­ly six kilo­me­tres. "Trav­el­ling at 50 km an hour, it will take sev­en min­utes to make this jour­ney. How­ev­er, us­ing the pro­posed high­way from Debe to get to Cross Cross­ing one has to ap­proach from the Gol­con­da in­ter­change and from Gol­con­da to Cross Cross­ing, San Fer­nan­do, is three km so that this high­way route in­volves tra­vers­ing eight km to reach Cross Cross­ing. "Trav­el­ling at a high­way speed of 80 km an hour, this eight-km will con­sume six min­utes of trav­el time. It means you save on­ly a minute of dri­ving time," Su­dama said.

He added that there was no ra­tio­nal rea­son to build the Mon De­sir to Debe seg­ment of the high­way. "They don't have a sense of pri­or­i­ty. The high­way from Debe to Mon De­sir is not a pri­or­i­ty. Fix the ex­ist­ing roads," Su­dama said. Mean­while, ac­tivist Dr Wayne Kublals­ingh said a strong me­dia was need­ed in the fight to save the com­mu­ni­ties. He said cit­i­zens had suc­cess­ful­ly stopped two smelters, the Es­sar steel plant and Carisal from de­stroy­ing the en­vi­ron­ment. "We don't in­tend to stop now," Kublals­ingh added. Al­so at­tend­ing the func­tion were civ­il rights ac­tivist Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj and po­lit­i­cal leader of the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice, David Ab­du­lah.