Dear Editor,
The oil world-producers, operators/contractors, traders, and vendors, among others-are all paying the keenest attention to that business of a balloon now shot down over the Atlantic. The Americans had no choice but to do what it did for what was a blatant intrusion of its airspace; official straight-faced Chinese claims notwithstanding. Now the world waits to see what its response will be to being knocked down a peg or two.
For their part, the Chinese have made clear their right to ‘respond further’ which could mean anything ranging from the adventurous to the dangerous. As we all know, saving face is highly prized in the Far eastern neck of the woods, and the face of the Chinese has been slapped in no uncertain terms.
I am also watching this development, and where it could lead.
This is because always easily agitated oil markets can stir from the choppy to the volatile in the blink of an eye. This is the kind of geopolitical, global superpower, development that provides handsome opportunity for the top oil players to make a killing. As a quick aside of sorts, the Saudi Arabians have already sounded their own warning a little while back that spare production capacity is very slim, almost nonexistent. Supplies suddenly constrict severely, tankers and refineries go into an emergency mode, and oil prices takeoff for the moon.
Taken together, this would mean higher deposits into this country’s Oil Fund in New York. When such happens, however, there is greater straining of the nerves of those already feeling the constant pummeling and humiliating local cost of living racing at greater and greater acceleration from them. Everything goes up in the price spirals that are automatic. From bread to bake and saltfish to bora (food), and transportation to tablets for illnesses (which among the poor and struggling in Guyana can think of, afford, technology tablets?) to the tormenting agonies of rising and rising bills, this is what any Chinese response would mean for Guyanese at the bottom of the economic steps all the way over here.
With possibly more Chinese American money, compliments of tensions and creeping escalations, going into Guyana’s Oil Fund, the budgetary and infrastructural sniffers and calculators are likely to have some additional feastings coming their way. Despite what could be an anticipated or actual cash influx, I feel sorry for those Guyanese left to their own wits to manage with the usual flood of soaring prices that follow oil market gyrations. Indeed, when the big powers sneeze, the little people, meaning Guyanese and others, catch severe bouts of pneumonia, which are usually prolonged and punishing. We have oil, but despite that luscious, once comforting, presence, we have all these pains, from all over, with some of them a bit out of the ordinary.
In terms of the latter, it means that there are all these anxieties about how much this fabulous oil wealth is going to mean for the mass of Guyanese left out in the cold, if it is ever going to make a material difference in their lives. The irony, and it is savaging, is that this nation could be the official beneficiary of more oil money, on the one hand; but, on the other, there is this swollen multitude of the hopeful reduced to coping, however they can, with the fallouts of rising oil prices. For the skeptics, I urge casting a backward glance at what flourished in Iraq for the longest while. Plenty of prosperity for some, and plenty of poor people left to watch their peers’ rise, while they crumble in pitiful fashion.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall