Millions of dollars have been made over the past 10 to 20 years by some unscrupulous land contractors who have exploited weaknesses [corruption] in the Ministries of Agriculture, Health, and Works.
It was revealed yesterday that land that had been leased by the Ministry of Agriculture for farming was being excavated, its top soil and fill removed and sold, to be refilled with garbage and other compost waste.
The top soil was being sold for $25 to $30 per yard, and the fill for $7 to $7.50 per yard. In one small site where the work had to be stopped because the excavators had reached the water table,, it was estimated that $50,000 worth of soil had been removed in a matter of about three weeks.
Visiting four such sites yesterday, Agriculture and Marine Resources Minister Leslie Miller expressed his complete and utter disgust at the greed that such contractors displayed in essentially “raping” the land.
“These are Bahamians destroying land for the future generation of Bahamians yet unborn, because of their selfish greed to make a couple of dollars selling this fill. This is not the only one, but I am told that there are many others in New Providence,” Mr Miller said pointing to one of the sites.
“When I got a listing from the Ministry of Works a week ago concerning this problem,” he continued, “it was indicated that land that the Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Resources would have leased in New Providence and the Family Islands, it was discovered that instead of farming the land, it was raped.
“The person who we would have given the land to, would have given permission to someone to strip the top soil of the land and all of the fill of the land. This is beyond a disgrace. Someone has to be held accountable for Bahamian land that has been utterly destroyed because you cannot even build houses here anymore,” Mr Miller said pointing to one of the sites where the top and underlying soil had been completely removed.
Mr Miller said that under the current law, anyone who destroys or damages land owned by the government, can be fined 10 times the amount of the fill they would have taken.
However, Mr Miller was not aware of anyone being taken to court for committing these acts. Perhaps that fact alone, he said, is part of the overall problem.
“We allow too many things in this country just to happen. Nobody is responsible. Now what we are going to do forthwith, land such as this and in other areas in New Providence and throughout the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, those persons who would have allowed themselves or others to destroy what is deemed to be farm land, they can forget ever having a lease under the ministry.
“All those leases will be revoked forthwith. I don’t care who they are.
“And we will go behind those persons who held the leases to make them responsible because someone has to know who did this,” Mr Miller said.
Obviously agitated, Mr Miller said it was high time to stop turning a blind eye to such infractions. He promised that his ministry will be more vigilant to make certain that leased farmlands throughout the Bahamas are being used in the proper manner.
On Cow Pen road alone more than a dozen sites had been excavated, with one in particular that ministry officials suspect had been worked on for years.
It was at this site in fact that Mr Miller and his team met workers with a tractor loading fill onto a dump truck while they made their walkabout of the “ruined land”.
Mr Miller promised that someone had to be made an example of for the land destruction that he had seen.
By PAUL TURNQUEST Tribune Staff Reporter
