Letters To The Editor - Destroying The Anguilla's Agricultural Land

The Editor,
The Anguillian

Dear Sir:

DESTROYING THE ANGUILLA’S AGRICULTURAL LAND

I returned home from the United States a few years ago and decided to cultivate some family land both as a past time and as a source for locally-grown produce. My plot has been very successful with good yields of corn, pigeon peas, pumpkins, yams, sweet potatoes, cabbages and tomatoes notwithstanding the fact that I am a novice in the field of agriculture. I will be planting my ground again this year and getting ready to have it ploughed.

One day I witnessed an incident which caused me to be real mad to the extent that a few tears rolled down my cheeks. There was this backhoe removing all the top soil from an area of land which, I recalled in my younger days, grew crops in such abundance that there was enough food for one of our poor families and for persons in other parts of the island as well. The backhoe operator, having heaped up the soil, proceeded to load up a truck which then took off to the west.

I decided to follow it out of curiosity and found to my dismay that it was being sold to an off-island project owner. Somebody told be that the price was either 700 or 800 US dollars a load (for the soil and the trucking service combined). That may have been good money for the moment, but for the long-term environment, from where the soil was taken, I think it has caused irreparable damage. What is left there is empty rock, the top soil that reared so many people in hard times, all scraped away! It has gone forever with no possible replacement by erosion from surrounding lands.

Where is the Land Use Committee or the Department of Physical Planning, or the Anguilla National Trust, or the Department of the Environment, in a case such as this? Don’t people have to get permission to do this sort of thing? Or is it okay to destroy one area of the island to build another area that has already been alienated?

Disgusted Observer and
Advocate for Save Our Land