We Guyanese have been selling our natural assets to foreigners for five hundred years or more, from red annatto for dyeing cloth, now to oil for powering vehicles. On 01 December 2022, the government announced a new version of a scheme for monetizing our forests – ‘jurisdictional forest-based carbon credits’. This idea has been tried…
Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr Lenox Shuman, listed some of the functions of the National Toshaos Council that are set out in the Amerindian Act 2006. He then writes, ‘the NTC, by the stroke of a pen and the endorsement by the entire NTC at the last conference, has endorsed one of the…
On 01 December 2022, Winrock/ART (Architecture for REDD+ Transactions) announced that it has issued 33.47 million jurisdictional carbon credits to Guyana, representing saved carbon in the forests of Guyana. Closely following the Winrock/ ART announcement, the Hess Corporation oil company (30 per cent co-venturer in the offshore Stabroek Block, and so a co-generator of huge…
In recent days, attentive readers of the “Letter to the Editor“ section of Stabroek News will have witnessed an exchange of opinions between Attorney General Anil Nandlall and Messrs. Sherwood Lowe and Vincent Alexander revolving around the question of possible voter impersonation during the General Elections of March 2, 2019. The story culminated on Wednesday,…
A foreign observer analyzing Guyana’s oil resource per citizen would guess that a baby born in the last few years in Guyana would be one of the luckiest of the 8 billion people in the world. But the observer would be mistaken. It is approaching 3 years since we started producing oil but one of…
Just last week, the newspaper headline said “Exxon posts highest profit in its history: Guyana seen as pivotal part of its portfolio.” This is a company that has a history of over 150 years in the world. The Guyanese offshore oil wells (that international news stories are calling a “high return asset”) have been a…
I write with reference to the letter titled ‘Culture is central to how we approach negotiations in an international setting.’ The writer posits that Guyana’s ‘cultural framework’ is somehow at variance with international, or at least North American/ European norms. Really? The briefest scrutiny of their supposedly ‘rigid business practices’ is instructive.
