Dear Editor,
President David Granger, according to a report appearing on an online news entity, during a function he attended in New York, is reported to have described sugar and the other traditional economic sectors as a curse. The President, if the report is accurate, has made a very bold statement and one which, in my view, says a lot about him and his Government.
As Guyanese, we learnt that we should never curse the bridge that you walk on. But the President, through his utterances, has done exactly what we were told we should never do. Our traditional economic sectors, which the President has described as the six sisters, have served us well and continue to remain relevant. In fact, two of them – rice and sugar – are the only sustainable industries that our country possesses, now more than half a century after independence.
From the report, the President says we should look forward to oil and gas which would be transformational. But it seems the President, his large Cabinet and the Administration’s several dozen advisors have not been reading the news.
Certainly had they done so, they would have read about the growing resistance and the moves by quite a few countries to turn away from fossil fuel to electric vehicles, with some nations hoping to have such a transformation in just about 20 years from now.
Just a few months ago, investment guru Dennis Gartman admitted in an interview that petroleum is “a worthless commodity”. Gartman went on to say that “crude oil, over the course of the next 20 to 40 years, is going to be a worthless commodity… it will be supplanted by something else.”
I urge President Granger and his Government not to cast aside the ‘six sisters’ and place our dreams, hopes, aspirations and our future in oil. It is a very slippery slope and as the experience of Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela is showing us, sole dependency on oil is far from being a panacea.
As famed Caribbean economist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Sir Arthur Lewis has taught us, let us maintain our existing sectors as we seek to diversify and build our economies.
Yours sincerely,
Patricia Persaud
