CAN BHARRAT JAGDEO REALLY MAKE MONEY GROW
ON TREES?
JOHN MAIR PAPER FOR YESU PERSAUD CENTRE
CONFERENCE ON ECO AESTHETICS AND THE
CARIBBEAN
IS JAGDEO CHAMPION OF THE EARTH OR CHUMPION OF THE
EARTH?
President Bharrat Jagdeo likes laps of honours. Last Friday in the
National Stadium which he built there was an afternoon of paeans of
praise to the Comrade Leader for his twelve years in office. Politicians.
vice chancellors,self styled bishops and Sir Sonny Ramphal-late of this
parish –were in full flow ‘he has helped to cast a pebble into what was
an indifferent sea, and the ripples it created are slowly becoming
irresistible waves,” said Sir Ramphal,as the Guyana Chronicle so
accurately called him.
Jagdeo sat and soaked in all the praise as he did when he was made a
UN Champion of the Earth in South Korea in 2010.He was one of six that
year garlanded though you have to search to find that fact out .
But with his low carbon development strategy is BJ not Champion but
CHUMPION of the earth?
LCDS;THE WAY FORWARD OR A CUL DE SAC?
The low carbon development strategy first articulated in 2009 by Jagdeo
is very simple in essence. Guyana will not chop down the trees in her
sixteen million hectares of Amazon rain-forest in return for the
developed world paying her hundreds of millions of US dollars in multinational carbon credits which will be used to take the country to a
higher stage of development. President Jagdeo seems to be defying the
old English proverb Money doesn't grow on trees .
In the world of the LCDS you get money to grow on trees but by NOT
doing anything to them.
Will it work?Is it fatally flawed.No and yes
WILL LCDS LEAVE THE STAGE WITH JAGDEO?
Bharrat Jagdeo will leave the office of the President of Guyana after the
expected general election on November 14th this year. He is term limited
and has done two and a bit already .
Handing over the levers of power which he has so tightly clasped will
not be easy for Jagdeo. Much discussion in Guyana centres on him
playing Vladimir Putin to Donald Ramator’s Dmitry Medvedev. The PPP is
yet to announce a prime ministerial candidate and that could still be
Jagdeo. There are also high level rumours swirling around that before
he leaves office he will create a super Ministry of Climate Change with
much power.
The Head of that Ministry-i will give you three guesses
LCDS FOR BEGINNERS
Put at its’ very simplest LCDS is predicated on the well known ramson
aphorism ‘If you don’t give me the money , then I will shoot the baby’(or
cut down the trees). Jagdeo set out his stall in 2009 at the Guyana
International Conference Centre-another memorial to the Comrade
President. Guyana had calculated, or had had calculated, that the forests
were worth $600 Million US to the nation each year. They would keep
them pristine and un-harvested in return for millions from the REDDreducing emission through deforestation and forest degradation -fund
set up by the UN. This is money paid by governments as trans-national
carbon credits to keep the world’s forests intact and slow down climate
change. The pot of money was there, Guyana wanted some of it to grow
on its trees.
WHERE WILL THE MONEY GO?
Those funds would then be used in development projects such as
-The Amelia Falls Hydroelectric Project deep in the Guyanese interior. A
second attempt at harnessing hydro in Guyana.That is being built by a
Chinese company but the road to get there is well behind schedule. The
contract may for that raises questions.
-The One Laptop per family project. What it says on the tim but for low
income families. Visionary to move Guyana forward to the digital reality
of the twenty first century.But to get laptops to work you need a
national broadband/wi-fi infrastructure. Guyana does not. Ask anybody
who has tried to use a laptop in Central Georgetown.
-Specific projects for the Amerindian/Native Indian communities. One
which is often mentioned is the proper titling of Amerindian land so
historical claims can be put right. Conveniently or not the Amerindians
provide the swing vote in any Election
WESTERN GUILT –AGAIN!
All of the availability of REDD and other funds is predicated on Western
concerns-or panic or hype,-you decide-on the Climate Change
Armageddon and the steps needed to prevent or postpone it. It reached
what was supposed to be its zenith with the UN Climate Change
Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.That was supposed to be
the Conference to end all Conferences. World leaders tipped up in
scores of private jets. It was an abject failure. No proper treaty
emerged.
The new World powers-especially the BRIC (Brazil,Russia,India and
China) bloc refused to sing the Western Tunes. The Chinese were not
prepared to give up their dash to rapid industrialisation and political
power for an environmental principle. That zenith of concern soon
became a nadir via the Cancun Conference in 2010 and shows no signs
of renaissance for Durban later this year. A clearly frustrated Jagdeo
talked in the UN in New York this week of ‘an anaemic delivery on
financial pledges made at Copenhagen, and formalised in the Cancun
Agreements, is leading to a disastrous breakdown in trust between the
developed and developing world’
So Western guilt and money has ebbed and flowed.
Currently it is at a low water mark.
BEFORE THE TIDE WENT OUT
Jagdeo had first developed the LCDS in 2008 with Mckinseys of New
York,a ritzy and expensive firm of consultants. The glossy brochure was
a very shiny begging bowl. The whole project has been and continues to
be largely driven by foreign consultants. I met Stephne Grin the current
lead consultant in May in the Office of the President. His background is
not Main Street Georgetown but Wall Street Manhattan.
Scandanavia is usually at the forefront of the world’s concerned.The
Norwegian government was the first (and last) to throw a tithe into the
LCDS begging bowl. They pledged $215M by 2015 with a down payment
of $80M in 2009/2010.
Look at that in micro terms-it is $1000US for every man,woman and
child in Guyana.
The money was placed with an international intermediary in an escrow
account at the World Bank in Washington. It is still there as far as I
know. Not one kroner has washed up on Guyanese shores.
WHY? WELL YOU TAKE YOUR PICK
There are several and contrasting explanations/
a.Noise from the Opposition .They will never be in power again-the
racial sums do not add up- so the political and journalistic opposition
make plenty noise internationally and shout into any ears they can
find.The main message is ‘Jagdeo is unfit to govern so too the PPP’.
They point to alleged corruption in awarding the Amelia falls road
contract to a PPP friend with little experience. There is some truth in
that
and they point also to the initial hiccups in awarding the One Laptop
Per Family contracts too.
There are signs that their poison in ears is working in Washington
b.Our hands are clean say the government. The Climate Change unit
expresses bewilderment at the stasis. They say it is not the World Bank’s
role to place conditional ties on the money ‘It is Guyana’s money not the
World Banks’ and that they should pass over the money toute suite to a
more neutral banker like the IDB or the CRB.(Caribbean Reserve
Bank).It is still in the vault of the World Bank.
LESSONS FROM IWOKRAMA
There is an exemplar-positive and negative; the Iwokrama project also
in Guyana. That started with idealism too-one million acres of virgin
forest given to the Commonwealth by then President Hoyte in 1989.It
was to combine conservation. commerce and science. But in two
decades it has lurched from crisis to financial crisis and is now much
reduced in scale and ambition. It was saved by money from Jagdeo,
parachuting in a white man in Edward Glover in as Chairman and moral
support from Prince Charles.
This very summer my son Matthew –whose pictures you are seeingwent to Iwokrama for four days. I too went a decade ago. It was
struggling then, it is struggling now. This summer there were just five
pure paying tourists and about a dozen students and teachers on
scientific projects. External income cannot be big. This is not a business
by a long stretch. Iwokrama is stlll firmly in the intensive care ward.
SO DOES MONEY GROW ON TREES OR NOT
On balance the situation in 2011 is redolent of that one hundred years
and two hundred years ago. Guyana is a small part of a globalised
market with globalised market forces which move much swiftly these
days .Those market forces are subject to imperialist whim but that of
the new imperialists-China and India to the fore.
This time the trade is not sugar or the gold of El Dorado it is carbon
credits and virgin forests.The rich nations-the market makers-decide the
price and even if there is a market at all.
Money,sadly ,does not grow on those trees.
Even Jagdeo cannot defy the proverb.
John Mair 22.09.2011
1500 words