Dear Editor,
With reference to the news item in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek `Residents devise plan to dam Dochfour’, what can be done to relieve the situation?
The government has got to get the Guyana gold mining workers involved.
Those boys can set up a 10-inch gravel pump dredge called a missile on a drum pontoon. The gravel pump can extract 30 to fifty tons of silt in a single 8-hour shift.
They need to make wooden frame boxes like a fence and fill up the space with coconut brooms, then line the bank of the canal for about 100 feet. The dredge will throw the silt behind this temporary wall and the brooms will trap the silt from running back into the canal with the water. When that portion of canal is done, move the wall to the next 100 feet and so on.
Encourage the farmers to plant lemon grass on the embankments of all their farming drains and canals. It is not the perfect solution, but it will work to hold the top soil from further erosion and runoff, until it can be replaced with the Ventiver grass.
The Ventiver International Network is a self funded organisation that goes to different countries and demonstrate that the Ventiver grass is the only viable, cost effective and permanent solution to land erosion problems.
International banks will not support this organisation because the Ventiver solution is low cost but labour intensive. The international banks are not interested in paying out their loans to local labour. They want to pay big chunks of it back to their consultants and heavy equipment dealerships.
The Ventiver grass will create roots of “steel” 13 feet deep straight into the soil. Not only will it hold the soil from runoff, it will also filter out the fertilizers, pesticides and heavy metals from the farmland runoff.
This grass will also filter out the toxins in grey water, sewage sludge and nitrate buildup in fishponds. It does not grow by seed propagation, you have to separate the plant into smaller bundles and replant. It can become an instant source of income to all villagers, they simply float their young plants on styrofoam rafts or bamboo and leave it to float in their gutters, so that it cleans up the toxins in the gutter at the same time.
The leaves and stalks can be used for basketry handicraft, it can also be used for thatched roofs. Once the use of this grass becomes widespread, the dried leaves can also be harvested as biofuel to drive steam turbines to provide electricity.
Another tip, mosquitoes do not like the smell of lemon grass. Citronella oil, is a lemon grass oil extract, so you can solve two major problems with the lemon grass solution.
It will take some time and effort but this problem can be solved permanently. They have got to stop listening to the advice of these foreign consultants.
These high paid folks have been trained to solve such problems with heavy machinery, concrete, stone and steel, which erodes after a while and is very costly to maintain.
It will cost approximately US$7M dollars per mile for work and materials and maintenance if done the western way.
The entire purpose of any of their development plans is not progress. It is driven by profit, they do not care if the plan works or not. If you have enough money they will stick around, when the money runs out they are gone. The government is left with the loan repayment.
Yours faithfully,
Joe Coxall
(Comment extracted from the Stabroek News website)
