It is our people, and not natural resources that really matter

Dear Editor

I want to commend without any reservations your Editorial of today, (Wednesday 17 June), entitled “Restarting and Rehabilitating” – very timely and appropriately placating. Indeed, I thought that that whole edition was suffused with that placating tone except for that letter entitled, “The Caricom Observer Team’s report is conceptually flawed” – sour grapes, but all must be given voice.

Allow me, however, as one who worked all his life in our natural resources sector, who worked through our nationalization of our bauxite industry and who stayed on through the subsequent difficult decades, to proffer the benefit of my experiences on our traditional but outdated national view of our natural resources, which was reiterated in the editorial: “We have the raw gifts in abundance and so much so that the greedy and rapacious and covetous cast longing eyes and watering mouths at our riches.”

That view with which I and my generation was brought up was understandable: our generations of slaving on plantations and other exploitations have left us suspicious of many countries and peoples. However we have been an independent country for some fifty-four years now and in many fora stand alongside other countries and peoples as equal brothers and sisters, individually.

Our vast hinterland would have projected the feeling of overwhelming abundance but later I learnt of the need to establish the numbers through surveys and prospecting, very costly exercises demanding lots of time, knowledge and cash.

Our bauxite deposits were being touted as the best in the world in the 1920s soon after their discovery but by 1950 they were being eclipsed by the new discoveries in Jamaica, Guinea and Australia, in the same way as we had eclipsed earlier prized locations. Our forests are imposing and largely pristine, however their average commercial growth rate may be put at 10 cubic metres per hectare per year; for Africa the average is 20 and the very special commercial forests of Chile hit 80! Considering our large gold deposits of Omai and Aurora the contentions and changes in ownership that we see are indications that all has not been smooth sailing.

Turning to our latest natural resource – oil, in about 2014, I was holding strongly to the then conventional view that oil prices would never again fall below US $ 100 per barrel. There would have been expectations of lots of money all around from our deep-water oil fields with production costs of US $ 30 per barrel but we have seen recently oil prices dropping to below 30 and we have become aware that there is lots and lots of oil reserves with production costs not much more than US$ 10 per barrel.

Our natural resources are not exceptional really, are not in themselves golden geese laying golden eggs continuously and endlessly. However, as in Omai, they may provide opportunities for us to work more productively and more remuneratively in partnership with others

Times have been changing, and in many things, we have not been finding the time to keep up and move along. There is a saying that a century ago a great economy was still founded on lots and lots of materials made useful with a little knowledge; but today a great economy is founded on lots and lots of knowledge made manifest with a very small quantity of material. Think of your cell phone and laptop – not much material. Yet by themselves, they are already powerful and when we connect them up into worldwide systems they are ten thousand times more powerful still.

The world today is much more open, interconnected and interdependent than ever before and it is time we become comfortable with the prospect of living and finding our way in our open, interconnected, interdependent world. We ought not to be troubled – we have a head start. We proudly say and it is largely true, – go to any large town or city anywhere around the world, you would likely find a Guyanese living there. We can live well with people the world over in their place, and can just as well live well with them in ours.

For the better life, it is we, not natural resources that really matter: as we learn to work steadily more productively, individually and more cordially all together as Guyanese; and as we develop a greater aptitude to discern, find and make friends and partnerships with peoples the world over.

Yours truly

Samuel A. A. Hinds
Former Prime Minister and Former President