The Road to Roraima
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
December 5, 2006
JUST when it was looking as if Guyana’s close ties with Brazil were cooling, there was some good news coming out of the Ministry of Tourism, Industry and Commerce.
According to a GINA report yesterday, Minister Manniram Prashad has stated that the Takutu Bridge is going to be built, and that bilateral talks are still ongoing between the two countries.
Reaching the height of its passion with a visit to Guyana by President Luiz Inacio Da Silva in February of last year, Guyana’s Brazil-philia saw such tender moments like the easing of visa requirements for Guyanese entering Brazil, regular Brazilian movie nights under the patronage of then Ambassador Ney do Prado Dieguez, and dinners out at city churrascarias.
Perhaps most importantly, the Road to Roraima seemed all but a fait accompli. In recent times, however, there had been virtually no progress reports in the press on the status of the Takutu Bridge project – stalled since 2001 – or how close the two countries are in establishing a clearly defined and mutually beneficial action plan for the construction of an all-weather road from Linden to Lethem.
It may be argued that Brazil’s political administration might have been reeling from political scandals which have hit President Lula’s Workers Party over the past two years, but the local government and private sector linkages that have long provided the impetus for the Guyana-Brazil relationship, particularly in recent years, seem to have been loosened a bit.
When the idea for the establishment of a Guyana-Brazil roadway was first officially acknowledged some four decades ago – contrary incidentally to the claim of originality made by one local political pundit – it could have been considered essentially as a technically unsound, economically unfeasible pipe-dream.
Congruent to the opening up of our hinterland region in general, it primarily represented the prevailing political ideology and rhetoric of the time, backed by little capacity for action.
Also, still basking in her label as the “Bread basket of the Caribbean”, the agrarian powerhouse of the regional integration movement that was soon to become CARICOM, Guyana did not see the sort of economic imperative in opening her interior as exists today.
State investment in the hinterland proved to be more venture economics, or misadventure economics, than anything else.
Things have changed considerably. The impending removal of our preferential sugar export agreements with Europe means that we have been forced to start looking at the admittedly long overdue diversification of our national economy.
This economic diversification, from a primary base of coastal agriculture, depends largely on a greater engagement with the country’s interior, whether we are talking about the enhancement of our eco-tourism product, the development of non-traditional crops, or the exertion of greater regulatory control over mineral and timber industries.
The Guyana-Brazil highway would serve as the main artery from which a strategic exploration and exploitation of our hinterland – one which will facilitate the movement of our vast interior closer to the centre of Guyana’s economic development – can be launched.
This is something which Minister Prashad stated, according to the press release, if not in those exact words.
The direct economic benefits aside, there is also an increasingly stronger imperative for the construction of the Guyana-Brazil highway, one which perhaps understandably was missing from most previous reports and feasibility studies. It has to do with climate change.
Sentiment about history, and the accustomed way of living on the coasts, may well mean nought if the current trends in global warming continue.
While the recent flooding of New Orleans in America during Hurricane Katrina late last year provided a good example of the danger which climate change poses to coastal communities, we here in Guyana had our painful experience of life after the deluge in January of 2005.
The opening up of the interior of Guyana will at least provide Guyanese – most of whom live in our climactically unstable coast – with the option of relocation, and hopefully before places like Eccles become ocean front property.
Today, a multiplicity of factors – the potentially profitable pressure exerted by Northern Brazil’s economic expansion, the need for a diversified local economy, climate change – collectively dictate that the optimum time for speeding up a process that has progressed in fits and starts the greater part of four decades is now.