You might not know it - but our newsroom gets complaints about land disputes almost on a daily basis. We sympathize with those suffering through it, In most cases we can't follow the stories - because the disputes are based on unsettled estates and family squabbles over who should get what. It's a widespread problem across the country - and one the Minister of Natural Resources confronts on a regular basis at his land clinics. We asked him for his experience at a land clinic on Wednesday:
Cherisse Halsall:
"Sir I wanted to ask you about the family Yard, in the media we have to deal with many land disputes, and we find that most of them are family based having to do with, settled estates or conflicts over ownership, these are very difficult to resolve, especially without lawyers and with cases such as this what's your experience with resolving?"
Cordel Hyde, Minister Of Lands
"We just had a case with a family where this girl's mother, I won't call her a girl, a woman, her mother died some year's ago and left this parcel of land for her but it is congested it's a bunch of parcel's together and a bunch of family members living on these different parcels but she has not been able to get her piece and so we sent our inspectors out there this morning to check out the situation verify that the piece that was in her mother's name is a standalone parcel with a frame on it that she had a foundation on and she had started to build and then hurricane Lisa came and crashed everything and so she is in a position to get her stuff but that has been lagging for many many many years and families can't get together and sort out things and that is where we come in actually that is a lot of the issues that we deal with on Mondays in Belmopan when we have clinic in Belmopan to see the public and the, when we go on these land clinics it's to try to solve these problems so that ordinary people can get the service and get the access and get resolution because under normal circumstances they can't afford to pay a lawyer to go to the courts and get those things sorted out and without having direct access to a Minister over a period of time then it just languishes, it just continues, it gets worse and sometimes it gets violent and so we are trying to prevent those kinds of stuff."
