The Alliance For Change says now is the time to update the National Development Strategy and combine it with the National Competitiveness Strategy as well as the Low Carbon Development Strategy to formulate a 2010-2019 national development plan.
The AFC in a press release yesterday said “Now is the time to update that Strategy (the National Development Strategy), combine it with the National Competitiveness Strategy, work in the low-carbon elements from the LCDS shopping list, and produce a phased action plan for national development 2010-2019.”
And to avoid what the party called “mistakes over the last three months in the LCDS process”, the AFC proposes that a neutral forum be convened for a multi-stakeholder planning process for national development.
Action process
The AFC also suggests that a neutral secretariat should be appointed to service the forum, coordinate activities and keep the timetable, create and service a website and ensure unbiased communications with the Press and other media as well as respond to all written or recorded questions.
The party says further that it is necessary to ensure that all base data sources, maps, satellite imagery and geographic information systems are in the public domain and accessible to all stakeholders, while protecting confidentiality of genuine commercial data.
Moreover, an independent chairperson or moderator (as in the NDS process) should be appointed; and professional rapporteurs should be engaged to record all the sessions, produce and circulate true verbatim records of the discussions as well as action-point summaries.
The AFC is recommending too that technical working groups should be engaged to deal with specific issues identified in plenary sessions; and overseas expertise could be utilized if there is a lack of in-country skills and knowledge.
The Government of Norway and other donors could also be requested to provide financial aid, in the context of climate change negotiations, particularly to allow stakeholders who live outside Georgetown to be supported, the party added.
In the AFC’s view, this proposed action process would not duplicate the efforts of the Guyana Forestry Commission to prepare a Readiness Preparation Plan to secure funding from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, which involves detailed planning to reduce Guyana’s current net emissions of forest carbon from poorly controlled logging and mineral mining.
The party further suggests what it called an initial list of topics that could build on the shopping list in the draft LCDS.
In that light, the AFC pointed out that building hydropower dams is itself a carbon-emitting process. “We need a formal comparison of the costs and benefits of building small dams at Amaila Falls and in the Middle Mazaruni compared with buying power from the giant dams on the Caroni River in Venezuela,” the AFC said.
It noted that no political party disputes that Guyana’s sea defences, drainage system and irrigation canals are in disrepair.
In that light, the AFC noted that whatever is done, the infrastructure will be overwhelmed by the rise in sea level during this century. Thermal expansion of the oceans and melting of the ice caps and glaciers make this inevitable, even if the increase in atmospheric carbon stops today.
“So we need a formal study of the short, medium and long-term costs and benefits of temporary repairs compared with costs and benefits of moving the bulk of our economy from the floodable coastal lowlands to non-floodable land further south,” the AFC recommends.
Regarding interior roads, the party observed that the Intermediate Savannahs are mainly without permanent roads for the good reason that the soils are too poor and topographically unsuitable for Guyana’s normal kind of irrigated agriculture.
According to the AFC, “opening the Canje Basin and expanding our interior road network would be hugely expensive, so land capability surveys are essential preliminary stages, then pre-commercial trials of ecological sustainability of agricultural production. Only after showing that production is technically worthwhile should we begin cost/benefit analyses of roading into such areas.”
The continued export of unprocessed timber logs, raw gold and rough diamonds, the AFC contended, “is against long-standing national policies and effectively means we are exporting jobs and skills.”
The party then queried that “if we can profitably process sea foods and some agricultural products for export, what are the real obstacles to adding value to timber and minerals? We have the excellent market surveys for agricultural products under the New Guyana Marketing Corporation; why don’t we have and act upon similar surveys for forest products and gold?”
While the draft LCDS focuses on construction projects, it pays only brief attention to investment in human capital development and to reform of institutions, the party said. It declared too that the country’s commercial banking system, indeed the whole economy, is grossly distorted by money laundering.
“Although the banks are flooded with liquidity, it is expensive to obtain a commercial loan and this cripples legitimate business expansion while Go-Invest is subject to Cabinet interference and this is a good case for reform,” the AFC concluded.
In the realm of jobs, the AFC noted that Guyana has one of the highest rates in the world for emigration of educated people – 85 per cent or more of the graduates of the University of Guyana leave the country within five years from graduation, and the party observed that this is a terrible drain which is not at all compensated by a small rate of re-migration in later years.
The AFC also noted that the three months consultation period (early June – early September) had now ended for the President’s draft Low Carbon Development Strategy.
However, the AFC said that sadly the President’s Office of Climate Change had been unable to respond to many of the technical questions posed during the hinterland consultations and urban awareness sessions where presidential or ministerial teams made their pitch for the brief shopping list of development projects.
According to the President’s statements early in this process, there will now be a revision of the LCDS in time for the 15th meeting of the Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at Copenhagen in December 2009, the AFC acknowledged.
