Suriname is going to make rings around Guyana!

Aug 23, 2021 Peeping Tom

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Make no mistake about it. Suriname came very well-prepared during the official visit of President Santokhi to Guyana last week. The Surinamese Head of State came with a high-level team and a well-set agenda.
Guyana did not have its act together. The only agreement which will mean any benefit to Guyana over the next six months is the agreement on fisheries.
All Guyana took to the table were talks and plans. Nothing concrete, apart from the fisheries agreement as finalised.
Last November, the Guyanese Head of State, Irfaan Ali, paid an official visit to Suriname during which talks and discussions were held on collaboration between the two countries. It was to be expected that during this reciprocal official visit by the Surinamese President, that the groundwork would have been laid for announcements to be made about the progress made since.
The fact that the two sides had to bunker down to long hours of talks during an official visit showed the glaring shortcomings of the preparatory works. The two leaders should have only had to meet to iron out contentious points but it appears, at least from the Joint Communique issued, that some of the discussions were preliminary in nature and that tangible cooperation has not gone very far except in relation to the proposed bridge across the Corentyne River.
The Joint Communique shows how ill-prepared Guyana was for the almost three days of talks which took place between the two sides. The Communique noted with satisfaction the collaboration and coordination initiatives in Foreign Policy Coordination and Political Dialogue; Environment; Security; Health; Infrastructure and Transportation; Agriculture; Investment, Trade and Enhancement of the Private Sector. However, no mention was made of any tangible outcome resulting from this so-called collaboration.
Ten months after President Ali’s visit to Suriname, the two sides are only now talking about a possible framework for joint actions/strategy, joint ventures and the promotion of local content to maximise the benefits from the oil and gas sector. So what ever happened to President’s Ali’s vision of an energy corridor between Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana if only now the discussions are about a framework about cooperation in the sector?
Why only now is a joint Working Group being formed to establish a joint gas strategy?  Guyana has not yet developed a national gas strategy, much less to have a joint strategy with a country, which is likely to be a competitor in the sale of natural gas and its derivative productions.
It is not clear how the two sides can have a joint gas strategy. Guyana does not even have a Petroleum Depletion Policy. Its objective is to maximise oil production as much and as fast as possible. And when it comes to gas, Guyana is expected to re-inject as much as 90 percent of associated gas back into the oil wells so as to raise the pressure of these wells.
Interestingly, the two sides agreed that an expert mission to Suriname would be led by Bharrat Jagdeo, “given his experience, international visibility and profile in the areas of the environment and climate change mitigation to advance the agreed bilateral agenda regarding the development of a joint strategy for environmental services and climate change.”
There is nothing Bharrat Jagdeo can tell the Surinamese, which they do not know. Suriname is far more advanced on the environmental front than Guyana is.
Suriname has a more development environmental programme than Guyana, which is relying on a half-baked programme called the Low Carbon Development Strategy which is nothing but a crude plan to obtain financial resources from reduction emissions from deforestation.
The PPP/C does not have an environmental programme. Seven months ago, the President announced that Guyana would broaden its Low Carbon Development Strategy to include environmental services, water resources management, climate resilience, biodiversity, renewable energy, and the marine economy. This promise in itself is an admission of the palpable limitations of the original Low Carbon Development Strategy, which Jagdeo had planned to showcase to the world as a model for reducing emissions while promoting economic development. But that plan collapsed after the disappointment at Copenhagen where Jagdeo was hoping that an agreement would have been reached to compensate countries for keeping their forests intact.
Suriname, unlike Jagdeo, did not go after any pipedream. Suriname, like Guyana is a signatory to the Paris Agreement on climate change.  Suriname has leapt ahead of Guyana. It has updated its National Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. What has Guyana done as regards its NDCs? Nothing!
And Guyana is sending an expert mission to Suriname? It should be the other way around.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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