Govt has one-track approach to economic development – AFC

Oct 29, 2009 News

Alliance for Change Leader Raphael Trotman yesterday, said that the Government has one string to its economic bow, namely, “tree money”.

“Our comatose economy now seems to depend on tree money with not much else in the offing…Jagdeo must be strongly criticised for this one-track approach to Guyana’s economic development.”

He stated that instead of focusing on the known foreign exchange earners namely rice, gold, timber, sugar and bauxite and trying to increase value-added production and investment. “Jagdeo is chasing ( all over the world)after the chimera of a fast buck out of conservation forestry.”

Trotman said that if his one-man crusade fails, “Guyana would have suffered opportunity costs in his failure to take initiatives to increase Foreign Direct Investment in those proven areas / sectors so vital to our economy.”

He stated that worst of all, Jagdeo has pursued the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) as a one-man show leaving out important national stake-holders from the decision-making.

Trotman was responding to the United Nation’s position on the LCDS that it might not yield success at Copenhagen come December.

According to Janos Pasztor, Director of the Secretary-General’s Climate Change Support Team, “It’s hard to say how far the conference will be able to go” because the U.S. Congress has not agreed on a climate bill, and industrialized nations have not agreed on targets to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions or funding to help developing countries limit their discharges.

News reports also said yesterday that the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has made a new climate treaty his top priority, hosting a September 22 summit on climate change to spur political support and traveling extensively to build political momentum for a global agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which only requires 37 industrialised nations to cut emissions.

Pasztor told a news conference, “There is tremendous activity by governments in capitals and internationally to shape the outcome” of the climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in early December, which “is a good development” because political leadership is essential to make a deal.

But he indicated that Copenhagen most likely won’t produce a treaty, but instead will push governments as far as they can go on the content of an agreement.