Be sensible with this overpowering focus on oil, Guyana has other areas for prosperity

Nov 07, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – We should not develop refineries for oil in Guyana. Oil is a twilight industry. We threaten
future generations if we sink ourselves into an industry that is on its way out. I get the sense that some number of us find these types of views strange or counter-generative. Do we not need the money? Have we not been too poor for too long? Do we not deserve this break? Well, let me say this for now: money was never our problem – please permit me to say this, as I believe that I am aware (with some decent
degree of profundity) of something of our monetary realities here in the Global South. Allow me to proceed with this letter.
Yes, we do need money. We do deserve breaks. We all do. In fact, we deserve more than just
breaks. We deserve futures. We deserve possible futures. We deserve a value-oriented society in which people have mastered the art of humanity, being able to select from among their own psychologies and harness their own capacities toward amazing realities – of which we are all capable. To achieve that
society, I believe that we must realize that things are complex, have many facets to them and that our decisions cannot be uni-dimensional or shaped by only one or a few factors. We need to become critical
thinkers – thinkers who can also integrate their visions and the challenges and constraints of the
present day.
I have been following hemp cultivators on LinkedIn for some time now. These Arizonan farmers describe that hemp is a notoriously difficult field crop to deal with. You have to be like field crop ninjas to master hemp. I believe this is exactly what we are out here, when it comes to sugar. For example, we have rains that appear suddenly and fall on one spot and not on the next and on soil that cannot take the load of mechanized harvesters. What’s more, we enter the world market for sugar at globally competitive prices and quantities. We do this using manpower. Guyana is an agricultural marvel. Others in other countries have taken note of us but some of us right at home here
seem not to realize that we are gods of the field.
Field crops can provide the basis for ethanol. Cultivated algae can also do that. We have the
wetlands for that, plus aquaculture. We have grasslands for cattle and sheep. Some people are even letting sheep and cows roam the solar PV parks to keep the grass mowed, while the animals get shade under the panels on hot days. Getting to port or getting crops to industrial zones for transformation requires good road networks that adhere to road hierarchy principles. Highways will take volumes of
trucks toward ports, without forcing them to go through the city, where they would otherwise compete for space alongside cars and people. Arterial or collector roads would take us toward industrial complexes and toward denser zones. Local roads take us to places where we reside, consume and enjoy our prosperity by providing services – which in themselves come with an incalculably vast universe of possibilities (submarine swimming pool tours anyone?)
I imagine that there are many ways to be prosperous. I can only think of a few things, as I have in this letter. I do realize though, that we can deepen our economy, supporting it with industries of information services (software, the web, data science) that enable us to become master strategists or make our sectors legible and targetable by policies, while providing jobs at all levels of abstraction across the processes that create value. Editor, can you tell that I am failing to keep this short?

Sincerely,
Emille Giddings

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