Dear Editor,
GLENN Lall was quashed like the proverbial bug as he tried to pit his Lilliputian brains against an intellectual giant and Guyana’s economic wizard, Guyana’s Vice-President, Dr Bharrat Jagdeo.

Glenn Lall has the courage of a fool who has the audacity and temerity to challenge an indisputable world leader of momentous achievements, among which are, inter alia: being a formidable force in international relations; primary reformer of International Financial Institutions (IFIs); an advocate for climate-change adaptation and mitigation – crafter of the internationally accepted Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS); champion of poor and vulnerable countries; and recipient of five honorary degrees from prestigious universities around the world.

He became Chairman of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) summit which was held in November 2010 in Guyana. The only Anglophone country on the South American continent, UNASUR was established to create a consolidated integration and a unified approach to developmental and trading paradigms in South American nations. In that first meeting at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre, then President, Bharrat Jagdeo was unanimously selected to lead UNASUR as its Chairman.

President Jagdeo led UNASUR into a dynamic where there was extant slow growth within the US and the European Union (EU) and created policies and programmes that generated a rising growth rate in a majority of nations in the developing world of UNASUR and the CARICOM bloc through collaborative and integrated endeavours.

He focused on market liberalisation and he tried to minimise the developing world’s dependence on the two International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and the Washington Consensus, because the diktats of these institutions impeded/impede industrial policy formulation and regional integration; thus, Dr Jagdeo’s uncompromising stance against the EU-CARIFORUM‘s Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), which protected the CARIFORUM nations’ sovereignty and prevented a neo-colonisation through regional manufacturing and trading enterprises.

The Cochabamba Summit in 2006 provided President Jagdeo with several platforms, whereby he engaged colleague Heads-of-States on Guyana’s place in the emerging continental solidarity. Guyana, he explained, is strategically located between Venezuela and Brazil, which presents opportunities for infrastructural development for physical linkages in the South American integration process, potentially creating a landscape for greater trading and investment opportunities.

The foregoing is merely touching on all the accomplishments that tremendously benefited this nation in an international context of the visionary and brilliant Past President and current Vice-President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, whom Glenn Lall consistently derogates and maligns on false premises with no merit.

Yours sincerely,
Erin Northe