by TONY BEST

MORE RIGID LAND USE is on the cards for Barbados.

And it's going to be so rigid, the area from Pico Teneriffe to Skeetes Bay in St Philip is to be off-limits to foreign ownership.

In addition, the Government plans to tighten scrutiny of applications for changes in the use from agricultural land to housing, tourism and other developments. At the same time, the public will be given a greater voice in decisions being taken by the Town & Country Planning Department.

This has come from Prime Minister David Thompson, who said in New York that the Government wouldn't be nearly as liberal as the previous administration in approving the switch of agricultural land to other uses.

"The question of a land use policy is something I have constantly said I am concerned about," he told editors and community representatives at an editorial board meeting of the New York Carib News weekly newspaper in Manhattan over the weekend.

"If people involved in the agricultural sector suspect that the potential is there for them to get that land taken out of agriculture and use it for other commercial, residential, even tourism purposes, then in some cases it would pay them to leave that land idle, because the rate of return is so much more, once there has been a change of use," he added.

"We have had many examples of that.

Committed

"I suspect that the only way we can deal with that is to have a more rigid land use policy and I think the Government is . . . well, I know we are committed certainly to those pledges made in the [Democratic Labour Party's] manifesto about the Agricultural Protection Act and about greater scrutiny of Town Planning decisions by the public," Thompson said.

But until the enabling legislation is approved by Parliament and enacted into law, "obviously, we are not going to adopt as liberal a policy in relation to the taking of land out of agriculture as has happened in the past," Thompson asserted.

Turning to Barbados' physical landscape, the Prime Minister said Government was determined to prevent any duplication of the way land was being used on the country's West Coast on Barbados' East Coast.

Hence, some restrictions on who could own land in that area.

"We feel very strongly that what has happened on the West Coast should not happen on the East Coast of Barbados," Thompson said. "And therefore, we have made a decision that from Pico Teneriffe to Skeetes Bay in St Philip that land would be zoned in such a way that it can only be available for ownership by Barbadians.

"We have a small island and we have to protect our environment and ecology and that is the basis of that decision. We feel very strongly about it. So there are going to be major land use issues."