LAST week, President Irfaan Ali met British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to discuss UK investment in Guyana and it’s interesting that the British press found it necessary to ask him why Guyana was interested in UK investments after it’s now got oil –and gas.

The President had to explain to a SkyNews reporter that never mind Guyana’s changed economic circumstances, it’s still part of the world and remains open to investment as it always was, including to UK investors.

He pointed out that “Revenues from oil and gas are not transformational if not utilised to create transformation” and that “the transformation we want to create must begin with the people” and that taking place in Guyana today “requires a lot of investment and new technology” — and “UK investors have been pursuing some of those opportunities.”

The President’s meeting with Prime Minister Johnson discussed Climate Change, Energy Security and Forest Management, as well as “a stronger relationship” between CARICOM and the UK.

President Ali still hopes to strengthen Guyana’s partnership with the UK — and all other countries willing to participate in fruitful joint efforts to construct a new global economic and trade order that urgently addresses the worsening inequalities and imbalances that have chained most developing countries to unequal and imbalanced trade and made them largely dependent on international aid and assistance from the richest nations.

The same message came from Foreign Affairs Minister Hugh Todd last month in India, where he made the case for the G20 nations to do more to accept their share of biggest blame for creating the conditions for the way the world’s climate crisis is affecting the smaller island states and developing countries that barely contribute to the worsening effects of Global Warming.

Climate Change is the foremost environmental crisis facing the developing countries, such that Pacific nations are actually drowning, some already submerged under the rising sea levels and forcing islanders to safe grounds elsewhere.

The effects of rising sea levels affect every country with a coast, but low-lying islands and coastlines are threatened now more than ever – and countries most threatened either take or are forced to take quick new measures to highlight the uncontrollable and inescapable threats.

Guyana has a 280-mile seawall built from time immemorial to protect the low-lying capital Georgetown and other seaside parts of the 83,000 square-mile country from the high waves and rising tides of past decades, but today’s rising sea levels in the age of tsunamis continuously threaten the entire city.

But it’s worse in the Maldives, where on October 17, 2009, the President and his Cabinet held an underwater meeting on the sea bed to highlight how bad a threat rising sea levels were to the string of small islands that are no more than two-and-a-half feet above water.

CARICOM nations, throughout their history, like all other former European (French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Spanish, etc.) West Indian colonies have long been like talking to the wind when raising justice issues of any type with ex-colonial states, as reflected in the constant struggles of developing countries since the 1970s for a New International Economic Order.

Proposals for structural change and readjustment of the unequal and imbalanced global trade system and the resulting higher prices of food and fuel and forcing countries to depend more on food imports for survival have gone by many names.

Guyana’s President Cheddi Jagan, between 1992 and 1996 advocated a New Global Human Order to build political consensus and a broad-based global partnership to combat poverty and promote human development, and at least two international conferences were held in Guyana (1996 and 2000) to encourage United Nations participation in building the needed global consensus.

Since then, Regime Change has had its usual effects of causing on-and-off starts and stops along the human development marathon at national levels in developing and small island nations, but the richest nations in the world in the G7, through their European-American transatlantic alliances in politics and trade, have always conspired to maintain their control of the levers of control that guide human development.

Developing nations have been virtually ‘spinning top in mud’ for six decades since Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago became independent and the Caribbean and the rest of the developing world continue to agitate and press for the rich nations to implement agreements and promises to change and adjust for creation of a new world order.

Whether its CARICOM’s call for Reparations from Europe for Slavery and Native Genocide, or small and vulnerable nations calling for protection against Climate Change and changing weather patterns, or the World Health Organisation (WHO) calling on the G7 nations to deliver on their loud promises to make COVID vaccinations available to poor nations that can’t afford, the response has always been the same: nothing doing and nothing done.

European nations that built empires off the Transatlantic slave trade refuse to apologise and atone, the nations contributing most to negative Climate Change and its global effects refuse to assume responsibility and take proportionate actions to help defenceless victim nations and the G7 nations have simply refused to deliver on their COVID assistance promises to developing countries through the WHO, instead using excess vaccines for booster shots – in effect, throwing second life-saving jackets to survivors who already have, while the majority drown.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates purchased the online war game ‘Call of Duty’ for US $70 million, Elon Musk will pay $43 billion for Twitter – and the US Congress is being asked for $33 Billion to fund the war in Ukraine.

The way the world turns today always leaves developing countries having to find ways to adapt and adopt to ensure their objectives are achieved through thick and thin; and in Guyana’s case, it may be time to revisit President Jagan’s proposals for a New Global Human Order, which still have strong merit 26 years later.