Dear Editor,
I wish to comment on the Army’s initiative on our porous borders and related legal or illegal immigration, referenced in SN 2025-06-25, ‘Venezuelan migrants being carefully vetted as part of border security response – Brigadier Khan’. If Guyana is to remain for Guyanese, now is the time to perform land zoning and distribution to implement the President’s policy of agricultural diversification, as opposed to ‘GuySuCo diversification’.
The word ‘bracle’ comes to mind. Map out the ‘polder-type’ farming communities and create the farm to market roads, plus export processing zones, EPZs areas and roads now, before Guyana is overrun by the flood of immigrants. Make Guyanese first in ownership of the land. This approach was done in Malaysia, EPZs.
‘Brackle’ the communities on the sugar plantation lands before it is too late. Halt the exodus of Guyanese as occurred in the seventies and eighties. Stem the Univer-sity of Guyana’s brain drain. Cultivate the Agri-business mindset today for tomorrow’s youth. Let there be statistical information release for matters dealing with Guyana’s population data. Mr. Khan’s initiatives could be used for legal work permit immigration to keep statistical records, something that is hide-hide in Guyana:
‘Further, Khan noted that the response is not the responsibility of the GDF alone’. Home Affairs Ministry should be involved in legal immigration matters.
Mapping out communities and parceling out the land, 15 acres for non-grain crops, the Canadian optimum, and Cheddi Jagan’s two acres homestead plus 10 acres for farming at Black Bush Polder should be the standard to secure Guyana for Guyanese. So far there are only about six private land-holding farmers who got sugar estates land on those four grinding sugar estates, Albion, Uitvlugt, Blairmont, and Rose Hall; some got far in excess of 15 acres as per GuySuCo 2022 annual report.
We had been too mean to Guyanese, putting opti-con laws to hold the diaspora at bay during their prime years of working and planning their re-migration.
Sincerely,
Ganga Persad Ramdas