A new capital can grow on trees

Sep 21, 2008 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
Your editorial of 19 September, 2008 “Coping with climate change” held out no hope that Guyana plans to shift its capital to higher, safer ground.

I firmly believe that the construction of the road to Brazil offers a unique opportunity for our engineers and road consultants to scope out a new capital location that is not only high above sea level and safe but also close to good agricultural land and places of eco-tourism interest and development potential.

Government has recently published an informative and slick colour booklet on Guyana’s low carbon development vision.

It is a seminal work and I congratulate the producers and the source of the inspiring “vision”. Nevertheless it falls sadly short of a truly realistic forward-thinking vision.

While an entire chapter is devoted to “Protecting Guyana’s people and productive land” it lamentably offers only a tangential reference that government and its partners “will be preparing a detailed analysis of the cost of upgrading Guyana’s defences against climate change and completing a plan of action to secure the necessary investment.”

This is fine as it goes, but still begs the larger political question. What is going to be done now about Georgetown given the Atlantic Ocean is pressing to get in permanently?

President Jagdeo has placed on record his “lungs of the earth” proposal stating that “as part of our commitment, we are willing to place almost our entire rain forest – which is larger than England – under the supervision of an international body to ensure compliance with world-class forestry standards. We will do this if we can access the right market mechanisms to make it economically worthwhile.”

Without doubt, this is the stuff that visionary leadership is made of. President Jagdeo and the PPP must be commended for taking a position that can only be described as ahead of its time.

Naturally Guyana’s offer to protect and preserve our 33 million acres of rainforest for the world’s benefit comes with a price.

The President’s bold initiative was featured last week in a BBC Panorama programme titled “Can money grow on trees?”

It caught the attention of many a British citizen and was the topic of animated conversation and debate in the City of London.

Word in the City is that Guyana is looking for some 300 million Pounds Sterling to conserve its forests (that is over US$600 million).

The Brown government seems to be considering this proposal to take affect from in 2012. However, there are some hitches.

Gordon Brown will have difficulty selling the proposal to the British taxpayer and electorate. He has to face general elections in 2010 and British confidence in his Prime Ministership has never been lower. Brown is battling for survival within his own party.

His many detractors, including some of his own parliamentarians, want him gone and will use his 300 million pounds “hocus pocus” to use a Luncheonesque term) Guyana Forest Conservation Plan to claim he is loosing his mind or that his judgement is seriously impaired.

Also Britain seems to be heading for a major economic recession and in hard economic times, people worry more about keeping their jobs and putting bread on the table than about Global Warming, Climate Change and conserving trees.

At the margins, country indicators like the corruption index, trafficking in humans and Guyana government’s perceived lack of discomfort with narco-criminality will make easy work for Brown’s detractors and a re-energised, rejuvenated Conservative opposition.

Guyana’s willingness to use its land mass as a huge carbon sink will win plaudits in Britain and elsewhere (our standing rainforests will convert the polluting world’s carbon dioxide, the earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas, into oxygen for the planet’s benefit).

But, Guyana is one of a clutch of developing countries not trusted by the more informed British tax payers while the uninformed masses trust no one outside Great Britain.

Unlike Guyana, Britain has a developed civic tradition (this means that civil society and stakeholders have to be listened to), hundreds of active oversight groups (whose only purpose in life is to closely scrutinize all that government does), highly effective parliamentary working committees, a free and critical media and a perspicacious constitutional ombudsman who alone will find at least 150 reasons why such an unconventional, unusual and unorthodox transaction can not be done with British taxpayers’ money.

But, there is a way around all this grief. As an alternative to the 300 million pounds payout, the President should ask the British to assist with the building of a new capital city on higher ground probably on the Linden to Lethem road to Brazil with a railway connecting Georgetown by the Demerara port to Lethem via Linden.

Major British road and railway construction companies and town planners like Mott McDonald and Arup can then be brought into the deal.

British taxpayers will then have the comfort of knowing their taxes are going to British companies, helping to create domestic employment and boosting their own crippled economy.

They will also sleep better at night knowing their hard earned tax pounds will benefit an entire heterogeneous nation and not just a singular ethnic, religious or politically partisan section of the population.

The British companies involved in the project will benefit from applying their new green technology and new energy efficient reusable systems and science. Naturally government must insist on the full involvement of our own Guyanese engineers from start to finish of this ground-breaking project.

As I said in previous letters the new capital should be conceptualized as a green low carbon city to be situated on high agricultural land to minimize unnecessary food transportation except such as is destined for export.

The British firm Arup, which is designing Dongtan in China along similar eco-¬friendly lines, can do the conceptual work for our new capital as part of the forest conservation deal. Once again the President must insist on the involvement of our local architects, engineers and scientists.

Major British companies in the construction material business can be persuaded to make building materials available to this project as a mechanism to offset their own pollution.

I am convinced that Guyana would sooner get a new eco-friendly green capital city high above sea level (or part of one) from the British and/or EU, than it would a US$ 600 million bounty to conserve its forests ( even under international supervision as envisaged) while Georgetown remains threatened by the advances of the fast rising Atlantic Ocean.
In this sense – “a new capital can grow on trees”.
F.Hamley Case

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