Flood triage and farmers

Jan 19, 2009 Editorial

If there were any doubts about the impact that television coverage can make on the consciousness of ordinary people, those should have been dispelled by the images of fellow Guyanese desperately struggling under water for weeks on end.

In the pre-TV era, most of us became aware of the enormity of the suffering precipitated by unending rainfall only if we were personally affected. TV changed all that: we were not dealing with an isolated phenomenon, but a catastrophe that paradoxically impinged on the very areas of our country that were most densely populated – the coastland.

But the nexus between the now seemingly endemic flooding and the high settlement pattern is not really paradoxical. The earliest settlers of Guyana – the Amerindians – never really occupied the coastal areas, where most of us now dwell.

The Dutch who “followed” them did so literally by initially locating their settlements way up the several rivers here”. Magdalenenburg, of the 1763 Rebellion fame, we would remember, was some fifty miles up the Berbice River. It was only when the fertility of those soils was exhausted that they moved to the coastland, which had to be made habitable by the ingenuity of Dutch engineering and the labour of African slaves.

From the beginning of the new settlement pattern, it was conceded that if the raison d’etre of the colony – agriculture – were to survive, the farmers on the fertile coastland had to be protected from the always-present danger presented by raging waters of the Atlantic to the north — held back by a fragile seawall — and the waters from the swamps behind the plantations to the south — held back by an earthen “backdam”.

The colonial state, first of the Dutch and then of the British, understood the factors underlying our existence and allocated their expenditures accordingly: the survival of agriculture was equivalent to the survival of the whole. These expenditures were not only directed to the building and maintenance of the infrastructure, but to the owners of the agricultural base when they were affected.

Today, agriculture remains the bedrock of our economy – contributing a massive thirty percent to our GDP, and employing the overwhelming majority of our workers. Agriculture also remains the hope of our future, since it represents the comparative advantage we can exploit if we expect to ever pull ourselves out of poverty.

It has long become a cliché that we have the potential to become the “breadbasket of the Caribbean: – if not further afield. The Jagdeo Initiative is a bold strategy that has been offered to Caricom to revitalise agriculture in the region — and the coastland of Guyana is an integral aspect of that plan.

As the Dutch found out so many years ago, while our immediate interior may appear green and verdant, the soils are quickly exhausted – we have to protect our below-sea-level coastland.

But it is not the land that produces – as the former rulers also discovered, they had to also ensure that the farmers remained to continue with their mission. They were the irreplaceable component of agricultural production. And it is this lesson that we want to commend to the present administrators of the Guyanese state.

Yes, the amount of rainfall has increased in the past decade. Yes, Guyana remains a desperately poor state. Yes, we must spend on D&I. But, as always, leaders have to look to the future. Without farmers, Guyana will never receive the near-term boost necessary to get our economy going. Over the past decade, TV has brought the plight of the farmers into the national consciousness. After every flood, we hear from their lips their inability to cope and their sad decision to leave farming.

From medicine we learn about the concept of “triage” – the allocation of treatment of patients or victims according to a system of priorities, designed to maximise the number of survivors depending on the available resources.

In the release of the waters from the East Coast Conservancy, which added to the woes of the Mahaica and Mahaicony farmers, we are sure that the authorities were not callous, but simply following the principle of triage. We suggest that they follow that same principle in allocating their admittedly scarce resources to compensate flood-affected farmers for their losses, so that we will retain their services for the future development of all Guyana.

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Flood triage and farmers

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