The timing of the closure, a year after the discovery of oil, raised hopes that the oil industry could somehow fill the void. But seven years after the closure, most sugar workers have not found new jobs. Of course, very few people work in the oil industry.
Their struggles raise important questions for Guyana as it grapples with the transition from the old economy to the new economy. How can Guyanese without the skills or education for oil-related jobs benefit? Another problem lies within the difficulty. What if the new economy isn't so new? What if the oil-centric vision of development is in fact already outdated?
Thomas Singh, a behavioral economist who founded the Green Research Institute at the University of Guyana, has argued that waste from the still-active sugar industry should be converted into cellulosic ethanol, a cutting-edge biofuel. But Mr Sharma, who heads the energy agency, said the industry was too small to provide much power from sugarcane husks. Some of Norway's carbon offset bonanza has been allocated to eight small solar farms, but Mr Sharma, who drives an electric car and has solar panels at home, argues solar energy is too expensive to be the main source of power. Despite claims to the contrary. The massive hydroelectric project that the Norwegian deal was supposed to finance, powered by waterfalls, has long been halted.
Now it is oil and gas that dominates the regional imagination. While I was in Guyana, I kept hearing the calypso song “Not a Blade of Grass” on the radio. The book, written in the 1970s as a patriotic rallying cry and opposition to Venezuela's threat to annex two-thirds of Guyana, is back with a new cover version. (The same goes for the threat from Venezuela.) To an outsider's ears, the lyrics sound like an ode to ExxonMobil. “When foreigners talk about takeovers, we don’t back down.” But in Guyana, legislation was recently introduced asserting the country's right to produce its own oil. Voices opposing drilling, to put it bluntly, remain isolated. The more passionate debate concerns whether Guyana should renegotiate its contracts to bring in more of the oil proceeds.
Oil is considered so useful that even questioning how it is regulated can be branded unpatriotic. Journalists, academics, lawyers, non-governmental organization workers and even former EPA employees have confessed that they fear being ostracized if they speak out against oil.