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Monday, July 14, 2025

Plan to build homes at St

Augustine nursery stays—Minister

by

2700 days ago
20180221

There will be no turn­ing back on the Cab­i­net de­ci­sion to de­vel­op lands in the area of the St Au­gus­tine nurs­ery, un­less the Town and Coun­try Plan­ning Di­vi­sion and the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Agency fail to give the ap­provals nec­es­sary to the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion for the con­struc­tion of hous­es on sev­er­al acres of the site.

But Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Clarence Ramb­harat is al­so as­sur­ing that the St Au­gus­tine nurs­ery will not be af­fect­ed and there will be ex­pan­sion of the nurs­ery if it is re­quired.

Ramb­harat told the T&T Guardian that the Cab­i­net took the de­ci­sion “ful­ly cog­nisant of all the is­sues and there is no turn­ing back not at this time.”

Ramb­harat re­sponse came af­ter the pres­i­dent of the Agri­cul­ture So­ci­ety Dhano Sookhoo host­ed a news con­fer­ence ac­cus­ing the Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter of fail­ing the farm­ers.

She ap­pealed to him to iden­ti­fy a site oth­er than the St Au­gus­tine nurs­eries which is now down to “53 acres” to build the hous­es.

But Ramb­harat said the land in ques­tion is 200 acres which starts at the WASA head­quar­ters and goes all the way down to the HDC East Grove site.

“It is a mix­ture of res­i­dences, of­fices, the St Au­gus­tine Nurs­ery, the forestry nurs­ery and some va­cant land,” he said.

Sookhoo, who was ac­com­pa­nied by for­mer agri­cul­ture min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath, not­ed that the land ear-marked for HDC Hous­ing had a “soil type that was very rare, you can­not go to San­gre Grande or Ca­roni to get this soil type, it is here and in Ch­aguara­mas and they want to take it to build hous­es.”

On the land, she said, there are hun­dreds of species of plants some ex­ist­ing for over two decades, “this is not some­thing you can take down to­day and have it grown else­where. This has been pro­vid­ing 38 dif­fer­ent va­ri­eties of food crops,” which she said in­clud­ed bread­fruit, av­o­ca­does, bal­a­ta, caimaite, five fin­gers, “when you de­stroy the nurs­ery that is what will be de­stroyed,” she said.

Sookhoo said the so­ci­ety had writ­ten sev­er­al let­ters, in­clud­ing one to the Com­mis­sion­er of State Lands Paula Drakes, who had in­di­cat­ed to her that she was pas­sion­ate about agri­cul­tur­al farm­ing in T&T.

Ap­peal­ing to Drakes, she said, “We the farm­ers have full con­fi­dence in you that you will not sign the change of use for this land. Let the coun­try know the pow­er that you have and don’t sign for the change of use of the land.”

Let­ters were al­so sent to the EMA, the chair­man of the Tu­na­puna Pi­ar­co Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion, Min­is­ter of Plan­ning Camille Robin­son-Reg­is and the Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley with a re­quest for him to have a “con­ver­sa­tion” with them on the is­sue. She said “we ex­pect Prime Min­is­ter, you boast that you are a farmer, we ex­pect you to be cham­pi­oning the cause and re­verse the de­ci­sion of the Cab­i­net.”

Ramb­harat told the T&T Guardian “this has been two years in the mak­ing.”

Ad­mit­ting to un­der­stand­ing that peo­ple want to “max­imise the use of the best soil,” Ramb­harat said some­times we go­ing to come across a sit­u­a­tion where we have to strike a bal­ance. Up to Mon­day, he said, he was in Or­ange Grove, “all we talk about Or­ange Grove and that valu­able land, not a sin­gle agri­cul­tur­al lease has been giv­en out for the land in that area.”

Asked if as the Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter he was con­cerned that more agri­cul­tur­al land was be­ing giv­en to build hous­es, he said, “it is very dif­fi­cult to get land to do this type of hous­ing on the East-West cor­ri­dor, and we could make this land avail­able for the HDC be­cause it is un­der-utilised.” He ob­served that sim­i­lar land was used for the con­struc­tion of the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex in Mt Hope.

Un­der a 1992 land use pol­i­cy, every ap­pli­ca­tion for the use of land goes to the Town and Coun­try Di­vi­sion, and then as part of the Cer­tifi­cate of En­vi­ron­men­tal Clear­ance (CEC), the EMA gets in­volved.

Ramb­harat be­lieves there will be no is­sue in get­ting the nec­es­sary clear­ance for the change of land use al­though the land is “grade A soil,” be­cause “it is al­ready a dense res­i­den­tial area.”

He sought to as­sure that “nei­ther the St Au­gus­tine Nurs­ery nor the forestry nurs­ery will be af­fect­ed,” telling the T&T Guardian “even af­ter we make this land avail­able we will have more than 100 acres that we can make avail­able for the nurs­ery if they want to ex­pand.”

Asked about the cit­rus, which Sookhoo said will be de­stroyed, Ramb­harat said the cit­rus had the cit­rus green­ing dis­ease.

“We have a re­port from some­one in Flori­da,” on how to deal with the dis­ease, “and the ad­vice is to de­stroy the af­fect­ed trees wher­ev­er they are in the coun­try, in­clud­ing the St Au­gus­tine nurs­eries, and to do the prop­a­ga­tion of the cit­rus nurs­eries in a more con­trolled en­vi­ron­ment.”

Be­cause of that, he said, “we are build­ing some new nurs­eries on the west­ern side of the 220-acre par­cel.”

A plan to vot­er pad?

Last Fri­day, Robin­son-Reg­is sought to dis­pel al­le­ga­tions that the con­struc­tion of the hous­es was linked to an at­tempt by the Gov­ern­ment to vot­er pad the St Joseph con­stituen­cy. Bharath who at­tend­ed yes­ter­day’s news con­fer­ence said it was clear that was the in­ten­tion, “by putting 500 hous­es in St Joseph we know what the Gov­ern­ment is at­tempt­ing to do,” he said.

St Joseph is one of the five mar­gin­al seats which can sway the out­come of an elec­tion.

In a 2013 by-elec­tion Ter­rence Deyals­ingh won the St Joseph seat with 6,356 votes against the then UNC can­di­date Ian Al­leyne who got 5,577 votes. The ILP’s Om Lal­la got 1,976 votes.

In the 2015 gen­er­al elec­tion the PNM’s Deyals­ingh cap­tured 10,356 or 53.77% of the votes cast to Bharath’s 8,903 or 45.44 per cent of the votes cast.


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