The doomsayers will forever bemoan the initiatives, progress and innovations created, achieved, and planned by the PPP/C Government, and Guyana’s President Jagdeo, even if it means development for the nation, as in most instances it does.

Accusing the President of once more taking the route of beggary and denigrating his innovative, internationally-acclaimed brilliant Low Carbon Development Strategy is so unpatriotic and myopic it is tantamount to psychological sabotage and a strategic attempt to derail the momentum of the LCDS so that it has no or minimal chance to fructify even while it is in the embryonic stages.

Come on, give it a chance – give Guyana a chance. More to the point, give Guyanese a chance.

President Jagdeo’s ‘avoided deforestation’ and the framework in which it is proposed is being hailed by some of the leading experts in the field as a visionary and brilliant strategy to combat climate change, while at the same time providing overwhelming benefits to our people, with little or no overhead costs to this nation.

This is, in whatever way it is considered, called trade, or barter, highly acceptable in the developed world, and in every other social construct. It is exchanging, measure for measure, commodities vital to the needs of both trading partners.

Most third-world nations do not have the wherewithal to exploit their own resources, so the capitalist system allows for developed nations to extract the treasures of undeveloped countries, on their own terms, which always prove disadvantageous to the host nations.

Our history abounds with such instances, even until now, where foreign companies extract and deplete our natural resources, leaving destruction and dislocation to local and indigenous communities – witness OMAI and the devastation to the ecology it has left in its wake, with minimal benefits accruing to the Guyanese nation, after having denuded vast areas of our mineral (primarily gold) resources.

Yes, the contempt that the developed world has perennially demonstrated for third-world nations and third-world heads-of-states when negotiating trading terms (witness the EU-driven EPA) may not result in an advantageous deal for our country, but Guyana’s President has shown that even when he is battling alone, he does not compromise on a position he feels is right for this country until he achieves his goal, in whole or part. Again, I refer to the compromise the surprisingly honourable EU made, at the very last moment, to accommodate our President’s position.

So, at the risk of denying our people benefits that may accrue to our country from President Jagdeo’s LCDS, why denigrate this initiative and our President so that the superpowers, who are already benefiting from our rainforests, after having denuded their own to develop and industrialize their own countries, are encouraged to reject the President’s proposal out of hand?

The proposed strategy would be complementary and not competing to the dual objectives of national development and climate change imperatives.

Fundamentally, because of the traditionally sustainable methodologies used by our first peoples and several other factors, our forests have been conserved in a pristine state. This is instantly recognizable because an aerial view indicates no break in the canopy, except natural breaks, such as waterways and roadways enabling accessibility and connectivity to various remote communities, so our President is not proposing to sell, or trade, something undefined or indeterminate.

International consultants, McKinsey & Company, estimates the Economic Value to the Nation (EVN) to be the equivalent of an annual payment of US$580 million.

This is the estimated value that would accrue to the Guyanese people if Guyana fully exploits its timber potentials, its post-harvest agriculture, and its mineral resources.

But while enhancing the development paradigm of Guyana, this course of action would have tremendously destructive consequences to the rest of the world, because our country currently provides to the global construct immense ecological and environmental services to the international community, including the developed nations.

According to the consultants, the conservatively estimated Economic Value to the World (EVW), provided by our rainforests through bio-diversity, water regulation, and carbon sequestration, is a minimum of US$40 billion each year.

In February of 2009, Jens Stoltenberg, Prime Minister of Norway, agreed to partner President Jagdeo’s LCDS initiative.

Since then, and even before, President Jagdeo had been lauded for this brilliant and visionary approach to a conservationist developmental strategy that is projected, not only to benefit the rest of the world, but will catapult our nation into the ranks of the prosperous – not because we are a servile people predisposed to beggary, but because we have visionary leaders who can formulate strategies to combat catastrophic equations – in fiscal, natural, and social terms, through the utilization of our own God-given resources within the international construct of survival imperatives.

The irony is that the very persons who condemn this Government for mendicancy through its drive for debt write-offs and now the LCDS were the very persons who drove this nation to the bottom of the world’s developmental charts and made us beggars in the eyes of the international community.

Guyana can rightfully stand tall today in the sight of the world because we have what the developed countries need – the lungs that will help them to live; so we do a trade-off, which the developed world understands. And we do so with dignity, because barter has never equated to beggary.
It is what the capitalist world understands.