Of car imports and the low carbon development strategy

Oct 04, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column

By Adam Harris

I happen to notice an amazing thing. Cars and vans are selling like hotcakes. I can remember when it took three or four years for the country to go through a series. The madness began with the PLL series. That was completed in two short years. I was stunned.
The Guyana Revenue Authority was forced to concede that the series broke a record. Now another record seems to be on the cards. Officially, PMM came out on August 1 and already, two months later more than 2,000 of these cars and vans are on the streets.
It must be that people have money. The fact that people may have money is not reflected, however, in what is happening on the business scene.
Businesses are closing in many parts of the country and it would seem that the number of children going to school hungry is increasing. I still run into an extraordinary large number of school children who ask me for money either to buy a drink or to take a bus home.
If what I happen to experience is true then there is no balance in the economic scale. The rich are getting richer and the poor continue to struggle. And when they struggle there is going to be a further decline in the number of children who would be ready to take their place in the world of work.
I keep saying that it is not by accident that more and more young men seem to be taking up the gun to target those whom they perceive have money. Just the other day they attacked a travel service but were thwarted by the level of security. They did this in broad daylight and in one of the busiest sections of the city. They are either becoming bolder of increasingly desperate.
A long time ago I proposed that Guyana get rid of its paper economy. If a lot of paper money is not around then there would be no incentive for gunmen to target establishments and hope to run away with cash.
Another set, or perhaps the same ones, attacked the Shell Service Station on Vlissengen Road at high noon last weekend. They made off with about $75,000. Knowing the people who commit these crimes, the money is not going to last more than a day or two, then it is back to the gun and to the establishments with money.
But it is back to the cars. In countries where car sales mount, there are efforts to build more roads. Where the space is no more then the authorities build overpasses. Guyana with its limited financial resources cannot afford to build the roads so one can expect vastly overcrowded roadways.
Already it is extremely difficult to find parking in the city. Anyone trying to park on Regent Street or Robb Street in the vicinity of the shopping areas knows the problem. And of course the police are there to enforce the law—no double parking.
It is worse by the commercial banks and from my perspective it will get worse as more and more cars traverse the streets.
There is another side to all these cars coming in. We do not have a problem with pollution because for all what we say, we do not have the number of vehicles to pollute the atmosphere as is the case of say New York or California. But we are the ones pushing low carbon development.
Most of the cars coming in are used vehicles which are not as energy efficient as the new ones. Our economic position demands that we buy used vehicles which the rich countries do not want. We are on the road to polluting our environment.
We also import used tyres and everyone knows that tyres are not biodegradable. If we want the world to take us seriously we must examine these things. It is true that we have scope for pollution. We live along the coastal belt as someone said, like ants on a sugar-coated string.
We were voted fifth a few years in the measurement of clean air. We have the Atlantic breeze to blow any polluted air in the direction of our forests but we must take note of what is happening.
Of course the government is smiling because of the revenue that accrues from the vehicle imports. The economist would argue that the more vehicles imported, the more the money and with more money the more development projects will be undertaken.
But there is still something puzzling me. How is it that there is so much money to buy a luxury item and not enough to buy food? Can’t the government take some of that money earned from vehicle imports and do more for the poorest of the poor?
I notice that we are building schools and not having enough teachers to staff them; that we do not have enough judges and magistrates because the money we pay them is inadequate.
Perhaps the government is undertaking too much thus stretching its resources too thinly.

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