Strategic planning can help Guyana avoid the trappings of continued unequal development

Jul 02, 2023 Letters

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Dear Editor,

As a rapidly developing micro-state, Guyana is susceptible to continued internal unequal development, a process whereby emphasis is placed on developing certain parts of the country at the neglect or bypassing of others. Widely acknowledged by both academicians and policy makers, unequal development cannot be easily or totally eradicated. Yet, most agree that strategic planning – both long and short term – helps in addressing and alleviating many of the negative consequences of unequal development.

While short-term planning customarily focuses on addressing current societal problems, long-term planning seeks to bring about enduring sustainable benefits with minimal disruptions in the modes of production, or destabilization in socio-economic growth and societal harmony.

Admittedly, it would be presumptuous to assume that the issue of unequal development can be addressed in a single article given the complexity of interrelated factors that contribute to this societal problem. I will therefore focus on the dynamics of Guyana’s underdevelopment and the production of unequal development with intent on concentrating further analyses on the issue.

To understand why the PPP/C must continue in its efforts to address Guyana’s unequal development, one must first understand the origin of this societal problem.

Irrefutably, Guyana’s underdevelopment, and its underlying structure of unequal development is a product of its colonial past, centuries of exploitation and expropriation of the country’s resources. Under colonial domination, Georgetown became the locus of national control, the administrative center of the development of underdevelopment, the instrument for promoting economic activities that benefited colonizers through the oppression and exploitation of the colonized.

From Georgetown, British-appointed colonial administrators orchestrated and sanctioned plantation owners’ vigorous exploitative activities to suck wealth from the rural sugar cane-fields. Their cooperative actions formalized and intensified the extraction of surplus, and accumulation of capital that benefitted England, and out of necessity, to a limited extent, Georgetown. Gradually, colonizers themselves established, or permitted the establishment of small manufacturing enterprises around Georgetown, primarily to enhance their exploitative pursuits of capital accumulation.  Within Guyana’s rural countryside a few strategically located, colonially owned, sugar factories stood as the sole manufacturing establishment. A few of these manufacturing entities remain as testimony of Guyana’s colonial history, a history of exploitation, underdevelopment, and the development of unequal development.

Besides being the principal administrative center of Guyana, Georgetown served as the colony’s foremost contact with the outside world through trade – import and export – activities focused almost exclusively on the extraction of resources. In this fashion, Georgetown and areas within its vicinity developed, while the rest of the country that produced the wealth lagged in a state of pervasive underdevelopment. While Georgetown developed infrastructurally, colonial administrators undertook limited infrastructural development in the rural plantations -mainly dams, bridges, canals, sluices, watermills, and railroads –all of which to hasten maximization of profits.

Utilizing Georgetown as the governing center, colonizers established political, economic, and social-cultural institutions that primarily facilitated their control and dominance over Guyana. And, through the appointment of White plantation managers and overseers, they produced and reproduced colonial domination at the local level. African and Indian field laborers, the plantations bulwarks of strenuous labor, received pitiful wages which kept them on the brink of starvation while the Whites lived in luxury.

When the Colonials departed Guyana, they practically emptied the colony’s coffers, abandoned a faltering sugar plantation system and a society plagued with socio-economic inequalities. They also left behind a divided nation, one primed with race-ethnic rivalries and hostilities – an unstable volatile society of their creation. Most noticeably, they left a two-tiered economic structure, one of a developed urbanized small manufacturing-administrative sector, and a larger underdeveloped rural proletarian-peasant sector.

With the departure of the British, the decay of Guyana’s social and economic structure and relations continued under the Burnham-D’Aguiar’s coalition government, and shortly thereafter under Burnham’s autocratic rule. Promoting paramountcy of the PNC party, Burnham, then Hoyt, steered Guyana down the path of deeper underdevelopment. For over twenty-five years, the PNC government promulgated unequal development policies which almost destroyed the rural sugar plantations and agricultural sectors.

Inheriting Guyana’s one-dimensional crumbling economic structure, the current PPP/C government is saddled with the responsibility of deconstructing the colonial-PNC system of underdevelopment and replacing it with one that is equitable and beneficial to all Guyanese. This process of development necessitates reasoned strategic planning to avoid the reproduction of unequal development within Guyana.

To date, the policy decisions and actions of the PPP/C government indicate steps to tackle and alleviate problems of unequal development through strategic planning. This brings me back to the sugar industry as an example.

Since assumption of political power, the PPP/C government embarked on the difficult task of reconstructing and reorganizing the sugar industry. Once the mainstay of rural Guyanese employment, the sugar industry began to falter primarily due to declining demand for sugar worldwide. By undertaking the transformation of the sugar industry through the consolidation of plantations and the closing of a few factories, the challenge the PPP/C government now faces is how to ensure that revitalization of the industry does not result in the reproduction of colonial style exploitation of labor, followed by the deepening of unequal development.

Sugar as we know is a seasonal crop which requires different skill sets from planting to harvesting. Historically, cane cutters have had to endure several weeks of unemployment after the harvest season which kept them on the brink of poverty. Would the younger generation of Guyanese opt to become cane cutters knowing the economic hardship? This is unlikely.

If the demand for sugar continues to falter, what alternative modes of production are likely to absorb the laboring class and simultaneously prevent the deepening of underdevelopment? This is the dilemma faced by the PPP/C government. In this regard a well-informed, executed, and monitored strategic plan would enable the government to address this dilemma, one that incorporates public-private partnerships in the productive utilization of abandoned sugar cane fields – whether this be the expansion of current projects, or the introduction of other sustainable multipurpose endeavours. If they are to assist in addressing the problem of unequal development, such partnerships must include reinvestments, rather than the extraction and exportation of profits.

Today, information technology has pierced every nook of Guyanese society. The poorest of the poor have increasing visual and audial exposure to the possibilities of economic success and material comforts resulting from living wages. Hence, living wages and alternative modes of employment during the sugar plantation off-season become essential.

With reasoned strategic planning that incorporates public-private capital investments, the PPP/C government would be able to continue its policies and programs relating to the social and economic upliftment of rural Guyanese, instead of the exploitation of plantation wage labourers and reproduction of elements of colonial oppression. Such neocolonial relations of economic domination, and surplus extraction, would likely facilitate the continued oppression of wage laborers in the promotion and reproduction of unequal development.

Narayan Persaud, PhD

Professor Emeritus

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• Burnham, Emeritus, Narayan Persaud, PhD, Professor

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