LCDS is just one of several gambles by Govt. in the last 17 years

Nov 16, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,

In response to your editorial, “That low carbon strategy,” (November 14), I think the writer meant well when s/he opened with this line: “Guyana made its mark when it championed the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS)”.

While I assume the writer used the recent agreement (for Norway to pony up to US$250 million to Guyana over a five year period, starting next year,) as the back drop, Guyana is actually coming out of the starting blocks at a much slower than expected pace with Norway’s offer of US$30 million next year.

Actually, there were a couple of other smaller commitments this year, but the race to reach the US$580 million a year prize Government originally claimed it can get from donor nations towards its LCDS likely will fall short. I said that based on tepid reaction to-date from rich nations and less than assuring recent utterances from the UN, which could mean that the December 7 Climate Change Meeting in Copenhagen may not bring in the US$530M needed to add to Norway’s US$30M so we can reach the US$580M target for 2010.

In fact, the President may have let the cat out of the bag with his remarks that the Norway deal was ‘Guyana’s Copenhagen ’; meaning, even if Copenhagen does not deliver anything in addition to Norway’s offer, then Guyana has already had its Copenhagen moment. Even your editorial writer seemed to echo the President’s position with these words, “The world is heading to Copenhagen and if nothing significant comes out of the meeting Guyana has already scored.”

To be brutally blunt, if nothing significant comes out for Guyana at the Copenhagen meeting there is no way Norway’s US$250M over five years will make a meaningful difference in our economic circumstances, and LCDS likely will be pronounced DOA, at worst, or wind up on life support, at best. Where then is the Plan B?

Mr. Editor, it is never too early for Guyanese to do a reality check on what passes for Government’s plans for our economy, and in my candid opinion, many Guyanese need to do a reality check on the chasm that separates the President’s economic-based LCDS from the actual context of the global climate change discussion. It takes a keen mind to pick up the stark differences in their focus here!

While there indeed is some talk about helping save existing rain forests worldwide, the central theme of the climate change discussion outside President Jagdeo’s rhetoric is more about trying to get industrialized nations – identified as the major culprits in the environmental crisis the world faces – to find ways to drastically cut carbon emissions than about getting those industrialized nations to urge poor countries to save their forests in exchange for financial assistance towards economic ‘green projects’. Read all the latest reports on the topic and see for yourself.

Therefore, the President’s climate change mission and mantra, much like other areas of his governance, is all about the President; front and centre. Like Forbes Burnham, he is the epicenter from which everything flows and around whom everything revolves. Though he did take over a government in 1999 that had no long-term economic recovery and development plan and opted to make it a priority working with international creditors to reduce Guyana’s debt via some repayments and much debt write-offs and forgiveness, debt repayments and write-offs alone could not turn around the fortunes of Guyana’s economy, so he saw and took advantage of an opening with a report prepared by an overseas entity that said Guyana could get US$580M a year for its economy under the guise of preserving our forests. Low Carbon Development Strategy was born.

With LCDS – a gamble because it knows no precedent – as a brainchild of the President and not the PPP, we saw the President take his one-man LCDS show from Guyana to countries overseas. Certain loyalists at home and environmentally friendly high-profile types abroad praised him because he used his status as a government leader to help push the issue.

Visibly absent even as a featured artiste in this one-man show, though, has been the PPP, which made his presidency possible, and now begs the question among the most casual observers: why the President appears to be running the country separate and apart from the PPP and Guyanese are paying the price waiting on his gamble to pay off in a big way?

In fact every Guyanese has a right to ask the PPP leadership why our country’s future must hinge on the gamble of one man whose selection by that party to be president was just as much a gamble. The PPP surely owes the entire nation an apology for going from political contender to political pretender, because while it now pretends to be the ruling party in charge, that burden falls on the President.

With the weight of the presidency weighing down his legacy sagging because of failures on several fronts, the President then made himself appear to be a global champion of slowing climate change. But while he talked about climate change it became increasingly obvious he was more interested in the potential financial benefits to be accrued from saying he cares about the environment than he actually does care about saving Guyana’s forest or the planet, period. Example: Georgetown, the country’s capital, is held hostage to a type of partisan politics that resulted in all sorts of environmental problems cropping up, and when we trace the problem to its root, it leads us to the Central Government, which has failed since 1994 to stage constitutionally due Local Government Elections. How can the President help save the planet but his politics render his nation’s capital more a garbage city than a garden city?

In addition, Guyana is a country that is 216,000 square kilometers in size, with about 700,000 people dominating the northern coastal strip and vast virgin forests dominating points south, and shows no signs of having a rapidly growing population that would need the space occupied by the vast forests. Guyana’s vast forests also are not facing imminent danger because of any laid out economic development plans that call for cutting down the bulk of our trees. That is the plain truth and it needs to be said.

But what is also painfully truthful to absorb is that the same rich, industrialized capitalist nations the PPP studiously avoided after 1992 for ideological reasons are among the same nations the President is pursuing to pour money into LCDS. It may be sheer irony or pure hypocrisy, but what is unfortunate for the President is that the rich, industrialized nations are more concerned about getting more ‘bang for their buck’ on feasible and viable projects than about paying poor countries to save their forests.

And this explains why at the Norway-Guyana signing last week he lamented the failure or refusal by other rich nations to eagerly follow Norway’s lead. See where the difference in focus lies?

Though they are not in the same category on several fronts, I still feel compelled to use neighbouring Brazil as an example of what Guyana needs to be doing to get its economy up and running, because even though Brazil does have its share of setbacks, it has done well as a developing country based on a pragmatic approach to development. It has a GDP of US$1.7 trillion, a 3.8% GDP or 3.3% five-year compound annual growth, an US$8,949 per capita, inflation runs at 3.6% and, get this, an Foreign Direct Investment inflow of US$18.8 billion.

Its President has made investment the central theme of his economic agenda that had nothing to do with slowing climate change, and the move paid off for a man viewed by many as a leftist. When it comes to our economy, on the other hand, Guyana’s President, has been…well, let’s just say left behind.

Earlier this year the World Bank committed US$1 billion to Brazil for preservation of its rain forests, which can swallow up Guyana’s multiple times, but that was done without Brazil’s leader ever being as vociferous or globetrotting as Guyana’s leader, who worked overtime trying to get rich nations to pony up the kind of dough he wants for Guyana.

But given Brazil’s own economic success story that had nothing to do with seeking money from rich nations to save its forests, one is then forced to ask what is it about Guyana’s President that makes him believe he can turn around Guyana’s economy based on a so-called low carbon economic strategy that knows no precedent? These PPP folks have been gambling with our future all along!

Since the PPP did not learn from the mistakes of the PNC while that party was in power for 28 years, and went on to make its own share of mistakes in the last 17 years, including gambling with the presidency, it does not deserve another term in office in 2011.

Emile Mervin