CSIR Loses Thousands Of Acres To Land Encroachers In Ghana

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has lost substantial portions of its land holdings to encroachers, a situation its leadership says requires urgent intervention from the government, the Lands Commission and other relevant institutions to reclaim and protect the lands.

Dr Daniel Asenso-Gyambibi, Dean of Directors of the CSIR and Director of the Building and Roads Research Institute (BRRI), said the Animal Research Institute, which started with more than 1,100 acres, had lost a large part of its land. The Institute of Industrial Research at Isilegon had also lost a substantial portion of its original 450 acres and was now left with only 33 acres, while the CSIR Head Office at the Airport Enclave, which used to have about 81 acres, now had approximately 50 acres.

He said that given that an acre of land at the Accra location was valued at about $2 million, the lands lost could have generated about $60 million for the CSIR if they had been properly transformed into economic assets. At Enyinase, where the CSIR had more than 800 acres, about half of the land had been lost, while in Kumasi the institution’s 1,441 acres had shrunk by about 750 acres without it deriving any economic value from them.

Dr Asenso-Gyambibi was speaking at the 11th Biennial Conference of the CSIR Senior Staff Association at Bunso in the Eastern Region. He said chiefs and individuals were encroaching on the lands, adding that there had also been forced takeovers of some CSIR lands that needed to be addressed.

He said the CSIR could not independently deal with the situation because the lands belonged to the government, stressing that management needed the government’s express approval to act, and called for a collective effort by the CSIR, the Lands Commission and government to halt further encroachment and reclaim the lands.