Our interior possibilities

Sep 09, 2009 Editorial

The imminent official opening of the Takutu Bridge, linking our southern Region Nine with the Northern Brazilian State of Roriama, has the potential of unleashing revolutionary changes in our entire political economy. The sooner we begin to appreciate these repercussions the better we might be in a position to direct these changes to our benefit. There is firstly the possibility of increased emigration from Brazil.
Many coast-landers fear the deluge of Brazilians that will scurry across the bridge, pilfer our untapped wealth and leave us denuded, not to mention pauperized. They have heard, of course, that Brazil has over 170 million people – a large chunk of whom are dirt poor and are only waiting to exploit our “vast potential”. The truth of the matter is that Roraima State is as under populated as our Rupununi – if not more so.
As for the touted “agricultural potential” of our Rupunini Savannah, the state of Roriama has an ongoing well-funded programme to attract farmers from other parts of Brazil to develop savannah lands identical to ours. They have encountered great difficulties in retaining those farmers that responded to their call.
Then again, the Takutu River has never presented much of a barrier to any Brazilian who really wanted to enter our fair land – one can practically walk across it during the dry season. The gold in Region Eight and further north has already attracted several thousand Brazilian “Garimpeiros”. One would hope by now that the authorities have worked out a methodology to ensure that the Brazilians are here legally and are declaring their gold to the Gold Board.
Even though we are not sure that Columbian drug smugglers will be cruising openly across the bridge we can be certain that smaller operators will be encouraged. More pertinently, as Columbia continues with its crackdown against its cocaine trade, we are sure that our porous southern and western borders will increasingly be breached. This newspaper has persistently insisted that our Guyana Defence Force ought to be reconstituted into a Border Patrol Unit and deployed on our Brazilians and Venezuelan borders.
We renew our calls at this critical juncture. In any case we have an immigration policy in place (as the crackdown on missionaries that overstayed their allotted time, demonstrated) which must be enforced by appropriate manpower.
What our administration also ought to be doing is to aggressively follow up on the interest displayed earlier this year by some Brazilian businessmen to initiate large scale farming in our Rupununi Savannah. After decades of research, experimentation, trial and error and bold entrepreneurial drive, Brazil has accumulated the necessary know how to make the arid and acidic soils of their savannahs (“cerrado”) flourish.
We need this technology transferred to us immediately. The cerrado, once considered unsuitable for agriculture, now has one of the greatest levels of productivity in the world and delivers 36 million tons of soya beans, 17 million tons of corn and 1.2 million tons of beans. According to one study, it also concentrates 89 percent of the Brazilian cotton production, 81 percent of the sorghum, 59 percent of the coffee, 55 percent of the cattle beef and 37 percent of the rice.
While many environmentalists have focused on Brazilian deforestation as a consequence of the country’s developmental drive on the back of food production, they have missed the positive transformation of the cerrado. In the context of our Low Carbon Development Strategy, the fortuity of our savannahs – and this includes our intermediate savannahs in Berbice – offers us the opportunity to have our cake and eat it too. There have been reports that possible destruction of the Rupununi ecosystem has been raised by some as reason not to permit large scale farming there. We believe that there needs to be a national discussion to address these objections so that we can finally move beyond “potential” in at least one part of our country.

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