Latest update April 27th, 2026 12:30 AM
Latest News
- Chevron shareholder faces questions on lopsided oil contract, lack of full liability coverage in Guyana
- Gas-to-Energy contractor history riddled with FBI raids, severed banking ties and shell companies
- Chinese engineer arrested for hours-long blackout
- Oil prices increase after Iran doubles down on Strait of Hormuz closure
- Glenn Lall sounds alarm on Exxon’s ‘87.5% grab’
Industrialized countries may be intent on miniaturizing Guyana’s forest-based extractive industries
Dear Editor,
Geographically and economically, Guyana has an industrial North and a largely undeveloped South.
One can draw a line East to West along the fourth parallel, which runs close to Apoteri, and divide Guyana into two distinct regions defined by economic activity or the lack of it. Practically all mining, forestry, agriculture and other extractive production and business occurs above the fourth parallel.
Most of it is land based. The industrial North accounts for roughly 98% of Guyana’s production and export earnings and is Guyana’s heartland – it keeps the entire economy alive.
On the other hand the area below the fourth parallel (about 80,000 sq. km) is heavily forested and for the most part unexplored, unsurveyed and unexploited. It is this area that should have been the focus of our visionary LCDS.
Instead we told the world that we were willing to place almost our entire rainforest – which is larger than England – at the world’s disposal. Wrong move!
The world saw this as the willingness of a heavily forested nascent democracy to place its national forest-based resources above and below ground, in service and sacrifice to the global environment.
We should have insisted that only the land below Apoteri was going to fall under the supervision of an international oversight body and that we were excluding our industrial north while offering assurances that all extractive activity in this part of Guyana would fall under our own environmental oversight to ensure minimum degradation, deforestation and an acceptable level of regeneration of the extracted stock where possible.
After all, the undeveloped area below the fourth parallel is equal in size to Jamaica, Barbados Antigua and Trinidad& Tobago combined plus Holland and plus Israel.
Guyana should immediately reopen negotiations with the Norwegians letting them know unequivocally that where our productive North is concerned it will be business as usual but we will ensure compliance with world-class environmental standards. In practice we could use the paymaster’s money to do so.
My fear is that the industrialized paymasters may be intent on miniaturizing our mining and extractive industries as part of a process that will eventually annihilate the mining and forestry sectors in Guyana. In which case, Bartica may well be the first salvo in this programme to preserve by any means necessary. I hope I’m wrong.
F. Hamley Case
Share this:
Discover more from Kaieteur News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.