Dear Editor,
In your news item, ‘Jagdeo upbeat on climate $$,’ (December 25, 2009), it struck me as quite odd when it was reported that ‘Guyana is likely to benefit from funds assigned at the recent Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen’. The use of the word ‘likely’ should make even the most ardent supporter of the LCDS now wonder if all the President’s travels and speeches came down to Guyana being ‘likely’ to get money as opposed to ‘definitely’ will get money. We all know what went wrong, and the

President should have seen the chaos coming at Copenhagen before it happened.

Let me also hasten to say I know of no funds that were assigned in writing to so-called vulnerable countries. What I read about were proposals for an immediate sum of US$10B a year to be set aside starting next year and running until 2012. Thereafter, the proposals call for raising about US$100B a year by the year 2020. While there was no major hiccup related to funding the world’s poorest countries, as there was in getting major polluters to reach binding agreement on specific targets in cutting carbon emissions or greenhouse gases, even the proposed

funding was not legally binding. Everything, as far as I read, is an agreement in principle, with plans to finalize being set for some time next year. We also don’t even know if the rich countries will ever keep their promise next year to fund the poorest countries at the promised annual amounts.

Second, if or when the funds become available they will go to the world’s poorest countries with rain forests, or countries that are actually cutting down their forests to practically survive. For example, to cook or to provide a form of night light, warmth, to travel by water (wooden boats/rafts) or to be housed, many of the worlds’ poorest peoples literally cut down trees in their country, and this is what the rich nations are largely focused on when they talk about funding the world’s poorest nations so they will stop cutting down their trees.

Now, while it is possible to see an academic link between the term ‘world’s poorest countries’ and the word ‘vulnerable’, I don’t think President Bharrat Jagdeo’s choice of the word ‘vulnerable’ (to describe Guyana’s economic position) fits in with rich nations’ definition of ‘poor’, which, when contextually applied, means people literally cutting down trees on large swaths of land to survive. Guyanese are not literally cutting down trees in our vast hinterland just to survive. Most of our less than one million people live on the nation’s coastal strip, some in some riverain areas and a sprinkling in our hinterland. We have more land than people, so Guyana’s vulnerability seems to stem from poor leadership.

In the meantime, while I find it ironic that Guyana is no longer considered a poor country by the standards established and recognized by rich nations, Guyana indeed is vulnerable to the vagaries of the global recession, but not because of a lack of natural resources, as is the case with other poor countries. Guyana’s vulnerability is due to the lack of a competent visionary at the level of the presidency who will come up with a major economic recovery and development plan outside the box of loans, grants and remittances so the nation and people can rise above poor (by our own standards) and vulnerable status. This does not mean the President did not try with his LCDS. As Mr. Eric Phillips pointed out in his post in the Readers’ Comments section of the news item under discussion, the President’s efforts must be acknowledged; however, Mr. Phillips also wished the President had been more inclusive. The operative word I detect here is ‘more’ and since the President reportedly did engage stakeholders, I would have liked Mr. Phillips to be more specific. What I can say I found rather disturbing was the President’s failure to keep his promise to release the details of the final draft of his LCDS before heading off to Copenhagen. To engage the public on such a major issue and then leave them in the dark does not inspire confidence in future attempts at public consultations.

Anyway, the President is back from Copenhagen and still talking about Guyana getting money from rich countries for LCDS, but the average Guyanese still doesn’t know what the LCDS final draft looks like. What exactly is the President planning to do with whatever money the nation gets for LCDS?

While some may be readily inclined to applaud the President’s robust efforts over the last several months, they need to temper their applause with a dose of reality. We should never mistake the hive of activity and many speeches by the President for an authentic and concerted effort by all Guyanese to save Guyana’s forests as part of our role in slowing climate change. In fact, several of us have long questioned the veracity of his climate change agenda, which continues to be a guise for his desperate and relentless pursuit of funds for his LCDS. It’s more like the revival of his presidential legacy rests on LCDS.

With the President moving from confidently talking about getting money for the LCDS to now talking about Guyana likely benefiting from funding, he has been exposed as a man with a single plan, or a man who placed all his eggs in one basket. They say the basic principle of economics comes down to supply and demand, and since the President is an economist, he had to know going forward with this LCDS that while he controlled the demand side of the LCDS equation, he had no control over the (money) supply side. It made sense, therefore, for him to have had a viable alternative or Plan B in case the supply side of his LCDS gamble did not pay off as expected.

I asked before and will ask again: What is his Plan B? Will he now wait out the rich nations to see what Guyana will get? What if the amounts are not commensurate with Guyana’s major economic recovery and development plans? He has less than two years left in his lame duck tenure, and if nothing major happens to help our economy before he demits office, I definitely don’t foresee any chance of him relying on his track record in contemplating a third term.

Finally, since he is a political creature of the PPP, and the government has underperformed and underachieved in the last 10 years (plus the 7 before his presidency), the PPP cannot contest the 2011 elections based on any kind of performance record; it will have to resort to ethnic pandering. If Guyanese again vote race in 2011 and the PPP wins, the PPP should at least learn a lesson from its mistake in picking a candidate like President Jagdeo. If the PPP does not learn from its mistake, and if Guyanese, on the whole, do not learn from their own past mistake of voting along ethnic lines, then both the PPP and the people of Guyana are doomed to repeat their mistakes and live with the consequences.
Yours faithfully,

Emile Mervin,
Queens, New York