As reported in our Friday edition, Foreign Minister Rudy Insanally disclosed that the promised May ruling by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea would now be delayed until August. The ruling concerned the contention by Suriname that our border in the waters between us as presently demarcated is not in consonance with what it ought to be.
This delay is not in our national interest and we hope that our high flying representatives to the Tribunal, Thomas Frank of NYU Law School, ex-Commonwealth Secretary General, Sir Shridath Ramphal , Dr. Payam Akhavan of Yale Law School and Paul Richler of the Washington law firm of Foley Hoag have expressed appropriate concerns.
The delay continues the further deferral of a vital cog in the wheel of our development program. We would remember that matters came to a head back in 2004 when CGX, a Canadian company about to commence drilling for oil in the concession granted by our Government, was chased away by Surinamese gun-boats. CGX had claimed that they had found a deposit with at least 850 million barrels of oil.
According to a 2000 US Geological Survey World petroleum Assessment, Guyana could be sitting on one of the largest untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world – the second highest potential among unexplored basins. The report stated that there is a 95% chance of finding at least 454 oil fields with at least one million or more barrels of oil; at least 1,139 gas fields with six billion cubic feet or more of gas and at least 59 fields with six million barrels or more of natural gas liquids in specific onshore and offshore locations assessed.
The exploitation of such a treasure trove of resource would go a long way on securing our economy the high growth rate that is necessary for placing us on a sustainable development trajectory.
In this era of an exponential shrinking of the world's fossil fuel reserves, there will be no shortage of heavyweights that would be interested to make the necessary investments to bring the fuels to the surface. And money into our national coffers.
It has been reported that President Jagdeo has already held talks with officials from the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol along with CGX, which had pulled out in 2005. Companies such as Esso Exploration, Exxon and Italy's ENI have reportedly expressed interest in our reserves.
Back in 2004, we exhausted every avenue to resolve the issue before going to the Tribunal, which we feared would be time consuming in reaching a ruling. Our fears were justified.
We held bilateral meetings and had CARICOM (to which we both belong – we had backed Suriname's application, and if we had raised their other border claim to the New River Triangle, they would have been denied entry) intervene to no avail.
Suriname has demonstrated that it was willing to resort to force to back up its claim and while President Jagdeo has stated that, “We hope the Government of Suriname will co-operate with us in achieving (a sound basis for economic development of our maritime region) we cannot be too sanguine if the Tribunal rules, as expected, in our favour. We must have a contingency plan in place before August.
An integral aspect of any such plan must be the development of our capability to defend the stipulated border.
We cannot have a repeat of the national humiliation of having our waters violated by Surinamese gunboats.
While we are at it, we must also bring to a head the politically-inspired claim of Venezuela to two-thirds of our national territory.
Maybe the World Court is the proper forum. The Venezuelan claim has stymied several large-scale plans for the development of our Cinderella County – most recently with the aerospace, Beal Deal. The funds from our oil wells in the Corentyne will have to be used to develop all our regions equitably.