Commissioner and Chief Executive of the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, Mr. Trevor Benn, on Thursday received a courtesy call from Assistant Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, Mr. Julio Berdegue and provided the FAO rep with an update on the Mainstreaming Sustainable Land Management project.
According to a release from the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission (GL&SC), the FAO is currently working in tandem with the local agency to implement the project.
The components of the four-year project include, land reclamation and development, implementation of a land classification system, and other requirements to facilitate optimal land utilisation and sustainable land development and management, GL&SC revealed. The project also caters for the development and operationalisation of GL&SC’s business plan, institutional strengthening of GL&SC and capacity development of stakeholders and young population, as well as to strengthen GL&SC’s information system and infrastructure for informed decision making and to increase education, communication, outreach and public awareness raising.
“This is a very important project to Guyana, so we are looking to work hand in hand with the FAO, to overcome the various challenges that we may face in implementing this project”, Mr. Benn told the FAO representative.
Furthermore, Mr. Benn hailed the meeting with Mr. Berdegue and FAO country representative, Dr. Gillian Smith, as a step in the right direction and said he hopes that this project will create some success stories for Guyana.
“We had projects here in Guyana, that were being implemented for huge sums of money but the results were minimal; I don’t want to preside over something like that,” Mr. Benn said, adding that the commission is developing the human capacity to ensure that this project is indeed successful and looks forward from the same from its FAO counterpart.
In response, the FAO Assistant Director said that he understands that there has been some delay in implementing the project, but promised to take steps to ensure that Guyana gets value for its money when the project comes to an end.
“As much as this project is important to Guyana, it is important to the FAO, and I will ensure that steps are taken to have this project executed in a timely and tidy manner,” Mr. Berdegue assured.
The FAO representative will again follow up in six months on the status of the implementation of the progress.
The project was officially launched on January 18, 2018 and the components will run concurrently over a period of four years is being funded by the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF) at the cost of US$14.8M.
