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Open up Guyana
Sep 27, 2009 Editorial
The ribbon had hardly fluttered to the ground after it was cut to officially open the Takatu Bridge linking Guyana and Brazil, when a study funded by the IDB warned that the surfacing of the road between Lethem and Linden, which Brazil’s President Lula said that he had next in his sights, may lead to untrammelled destruction of our forest’s flora and fauna.
Such a road, of course, had been on the cards since 1977 when the then Prime Minister Burnham had visited Brazil but circumstances had conspired to prevent it from becoming a reality.
This is not entirely a coincidence that without the road that would have opened up our interior, we have remained for all intents and purposes, a replica of the overcrowded baracoon that constitutes most of our West Indian neighbours. As one observer pointed out, we cling to our coastal settlements on a single road along the Atlantic like ants on a string dipped in sugar water.
Our actual living area for our population is effectively less than two hundred square miles – giving us a population density greater than the 166 square-mile Barbados. Yet we boast about our 83,000 square miles. Land, land everywhere; yet not an acre to plough.
Of course, the cynics among us (and they are legion) may suggest that the report, “Climate Change and Biodiversity Mainstreaming through Avoided Deforestation – Guyana Case Study” was released just at the moment that President Jagdeo was at the UN plugging our case for REDD money to fund the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) that is supposed to catapult us out of our present economic doldrums.
“REDD”, for those who might have been living on the top of Mt. Roraima for the last year and missed the TV blitz explaining it, stands for “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation”. Very simply it proposes to the developed world that companies emitting Carbon Dioxide could in effect pay us to keep our forests intact, since the latter act as a countervailing “carbon sink”.
The converse, as the recently released report warns, is that if we don’t get paid then we would most likely destroy our forests in search of the holy grail of economic development and growth and release oodles of CO2 into the atmosphere. One expert from Conservation International had recently warned that some two million hectares of forests could be lost if we do not receive enough money from the REDD mechanism – which is still very much up in the air – to devise ways to head off that gargantuan release of CO2.
Now whatever the motive is of those that compiled the report, we do believe that it raises the most important issue of the nature of the developmental path we ought to pursue in the immediate future. In our estimation, the die has long been cast – but we have just been too reluctant to accept its results. We have a continental destiny and the sooner we accept the implications of that fact the better it will be for all of us. There is no question that we must have the paved road between Lethem and Linden – and then onto a deep-water harbour in Berbice that will open up another swath of our country and diversify our shipping potential. The government has outlined a LCDS that has announced to the world that we are not oblivious to the dangers of global warming; but the ball is in the developed world’s court.
In the short term, the hydroelectric power project and the mega-farms in our savannahs suggested by President Lula as feasible for Brazilian help in developing, are all within the LCDS’s ambit.
But we should hold neither our breaths nor our plans that may go beyond that. We believe that REDD has too many hurdles to overcome before December. Even the conservationist crowd is divided: some believe that giving polluters in the developed countries the escape hatch of trading with poor countries like us for “carbon credits” undermines any hope of forcing real cuts in those countries’ emissions.
A (development) bird in the hand, our old-folks advice, is worth two in the (environmentally correct) bush.
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