Dear Editor,
Your editorial, ‘Flood cycle’ of February 5, 2012 despairingly reiterated the lack, and dire consequences, of a publicly available and convincingly argued plan for water management on Guyana’s increasingly waterlogged coastal plain. What followed the 2005 flood was the unilateral imposition of the big-spending but Hope(less) Canal by the PPP government. In addition, as many have pointed out, seven years later, the government has yet to provide an independently audited account of how the flood relief monies were spent.
Your editorial quotes a Mahaicony farmer who “told our reporter on Thursday, ‘We only hope now is parliament… and I hoping that with the opposition having more say in parliament, that something is done for we the residents of Mahaicony Creek.’”
That ‘something’ should include a national discussion about national options in response to inexorable sea level rise (SLR) due to thermal expansion of the oceans as well as melting glaciers and ice caps. The World Bank’s Policy Research Working Paper 4136, of February 2007, titled ‘The impact of sea level rise on developing countries: a comparative analysis’ (http://papers. ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=962790 ) showed that out of a study of 84 coastal developing countries, ‘with a 1 metre sea level rise (SLR), the populations of Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana, and The Bahamas would be most severely impacted (as a percentage of national population): 7.0%, 6.3%, 5.4% and 4.5% respectively’… Guyana would exhibit the largest percentage of urban extent impacted (p 12-13).
There are other studies before and since that make the same point – sea level rise is happening, and consequently our gravity drainage system through kokers in the sea dams will become less and less able to prevent flooding. Our Guyanese rulers have not been as smart as King Canute (Cnut Sweynsson) at the beginning of the eleventh century. Our Champion has built his palace on the Sparendaam foreshore. But just as Canute could not command the tides to roll back (and did not attempt to try, he was just demonstrating that government is not all-powerful), nor can our grandiose leaders. So what have been their official responses to sea level rise?
At the Conference of Parties (COP 15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), then President Jagdeo said at a side event that “… planning is difficult. In Guyana’s case, he said that there have been suggestions to shift agriculture inland and to relocate the capital city. But this he said is unaffordable. ‘We just have to protect what we have,’ Jagdeo stated” (‘Jagdeo remains unimpressed with US$10B fund’ KN, December 16, 2009).
In May 2011, Robeson Benn, the Minister of Transport and Hydraulics, was even more specific: “On the issue of climate change, the debate as to whether the coast should be abandoned for the highlands came up. Benn gave the assurance that, according to scientific evidence, ‘we will have about 67 years before we will have to raise the sea defences by half a metre. We have to progressively build and improve over time… From an engineering standpoint, staying on the coast is manageable and do-able’ he said” (‘Historical precedent guides sea defence spending’ GC, May 5, 2011). So far as I am aware, there is no government document which assesses the continually increasing cost of sea defence and drainage against the option of a strategic retreat to land safe from flooding.
The serial failures of our government ministers are most viscerally experienced by the farmers of Mahaica and Mahaicony, this year expanded to Black Bush Polder and the Pomeroon. The government’s obstinate refusal to take up the reasoned recommendations of the National Development Strategy (NDS) on this issue may be related to the ability to top-slice ‘sea defence’ contracts which involve little more complicated than tipping rip-rap rock on the foreshore.
I would like to expand the call in your editorial: “The opposition should pay attention, and add drainage in the critical farming communities to their already lengthy agenda; too many livelihoods are at stake for this to be ignored.“The opposition members of the National Assembly should call for a national multi-stakeholder discussion of this issue, using the NDS as a starting point. And this discussion should note that the PPP/C has recognized that habitation of the coastal plain is not a long-term option: “Recently the Ministry of Agriculture, in collaboration with the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, handed over close to 160 leases for farmlands in the Pomeroon and along the Essequibo Coast, as government continues apace with initiatives that would see the agriculture sector adapt to climate change.
The lands distributed by way of leases as part of the Essequibo Land Development project, are located in the high elevations, making them less susceptible to flooding“ (GC, November 14, 2011). This and my previous quotations show that Cabinet itself does not have a coherent strategy.
Yours faithfully,
Janette Bulkan