Dear Editor,
Given our endowment of rice agricultural lands here in Region 2, it is a matter of common sense to expand the Aurora irrigation scheme in Region 2; that should be one of the main planks of our development strategy.
We in Region 2 are in the fortunate position of being able to break the cycle of low production, which is the direct cause of our poverty. We have to change this situation by increasing significantly the acreage available for the small man. We still have far too many hectares of good agricultural land which are either idle or are inefficiently utilised in the Aurora and Supenaam creek area. Apart from the self-sufficiency objective, our policy must be to expand food production for export. In the first place, the current projections are that in the years ahead food prices will rise more sharply than oil prices. As young farmers of this region, we have a duty to use our agricultural potential to help alleviate the suffering which follows on a shortage of food in the world.
It is the government’s duty to attract young farmers to the land and to keep progressive farmers on the land, to generate surpluses from agricultural activities to finance rural development and to make a substantial contribution to the national economy. The government must urgently remove the many problems which have in the past hampered agricultural production. One of the most important of these is land tenure. We have not yet acted on the issue of landlordism, nor have we acted on the problem of idle and inefficiently utilised agricultural lands.
However, we must not think only of large, expensive projects. We must identify the areas which require small schemes like Aurora, which can be undertaken by the central government, local government and the community in collaboration or separately as the circumstances dictate. Not a single hectare of cultivable land should be allowed to be uncultivated or to give low yields because of the absence of some small facility for proper drainage and irrigation.
Yours faithfully,
Mohamed Khan
