In a recent interview with this publication, Guyanese-born academic and security specialist Dr Ivelaw Griffith spoke at length on regional security issues, including those which he considered to be the key threats to the safety of the Caribbean and ways in which the region might act collectively to help reduce its vulnerabilities in this sector.
Those challenges on which the Guyanese-born security specialist spoke include the proliferation of drugs and money laundering, weak and often corruption-prone systems and what, increasingly, is becoming the astronomical costs associated with financing security.
In the case of Guyana and several other Caribbean countries security issues have become intertwined with boundary disputes and territorial claims; much more so in Guyana’s case than in the case of the other Caribbean territories.
Asked whether mining activity in the country’s gold industry had implications for national security Dr Griffith replied in the affirmative, proffering issues such as the implications of the movement of people across borders (in this case Brazilians and Venezuelans); the illegal movement of things like guns and drugs and the whole cauldron of vulnerabilities that go with largely unregulated mining activities in a vast and largely unprotected area of the country.
Not once, however, did Dr Griffith overlook the importance of the mining industry to the country’s economy. Indeed he made the point the economic considerations had to be taken account of in the same way that the security considerations had to be taken on board.
In fact Dr Griffith endorsed the view that striking a balance – that is to say maximizing the economic benefits to be derived from the gold industry while seeking as far as possible to manage the risks associated with the country’s security – was the way forward.
Dr Griffith’s assessment of security from the standpoint of the gold mining sector is a perspective to which the Government of Guyana would do well to heed. Setting aside the porous nature of the country’s borders and the woeful ineptitude of interior policing there is also the tendency towards a ‘Wild West’ culture which has emerged in those interior regions where gold is to be found. Indeed, Dr Griffith made the telling point that gold can have the effect of blurring boundaries between states so that we run the risk of ending up with huge areas of borderless space where gold is mined and, by extension with huge areas of lawlessness.
What makes Guyana uniquely vulnerable here is the sparseness of our population, the vulnerability of our Amerindian communities, the absence of resources with which to properly protect our borders and what appears, sometimes, to be a lack of will. The question that arises here, of course, is whether gold might not, in the longer term, turn out to be a poisoned chalice.
