By Percy C. Hintzen
Percy C. Hintzen is a Guyanese sociologist specializing in postcolonial political economy. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Professor in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. At Berkeley he served as Director of the Center for African Studies, Co-Director of the Multi Campus Research Group on Africa, Chair of African American Studies, Director of Peace and Conflict Studies, and Acting Director of the Center for Race and Gender. He is a former President of the Caribbean Studies Association
Between 1957-1962, before it was forced out of power through the connivance of Great Britain and the United States, the anti-colonial democratic socialist government of the PPP embarked on an extensive program of rural agricultural development and polderization that significantly increased small and mid-scale domestic farm production. Included in the program were significant support for farmers and for appropriate farming technology. The preservation of traditional farming methods by the country’s indigenous population who live in the hinterland of the country and the legacy of these policies have combined to make Guyana the only country in the world today that can provide its entire population with all the meat, dairy, fish, vegetables, fruit, starchy-staples and plant-based proteins that it needs.
There is an existential threat to humanity from a growing crisis of food scarcity. Climate change, modern industry, displacement of agro-producers, the loss of land rights, and the global shift to processed foods are its combined causes. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization is calling for adoption and protection of Indigenous food systems globally, which it sees as the only solution to the crisis. But in today’s Guyana, little else matters other than what is useable to the oil economy. The priority is serving the oil industry’s needs for inputs, production, infrastructure, export, and for domestic usages of its gas. The thinking is that once these are satisfied, then everything will be taken care of. This is what economists call unbalanced growth. In Guyana it is centered upon oil extraction. Domestic producers of food are less and less part of this equation. Farmers, fishermen, and the indigenous, all responsible for Guyana’s food independence, are secondary to the modern Guyanese economy as it transitions into a “petro-state.”
In 2007, I accompanied 100 students from the University of California on a summer abroad program. We stayed at Lake Mainstay in Anna Regina on the Essequibo Coast. Our Monday mornings were spent in the bustling small town of Charity. Mondays were when Amerindians bring their produce to market. Signs of prosperity were everywhere, generated almost exclusively from Amerindian agricultural produce, transported by small boats on the Pomeroon River to Charity. Along the coastal strip between Supenaam and Charity, rice farming and milling, fruit and vegetable production, fresh and saltwater fishing, and animal husbandry were sources of a similar prosperity. The coast was a hub of economic activity by small and medium sized entrepreneurs. They marketed, distributed and provided goods and services to those engaged in agro-production and fishing on the coast and in the Pomeroon. Some were not locals. On the road to Lake Mainstay a small, modern French-owned factory purchased, prepared,vacuum sealed, and labeled a particularly rare variety of pineapples for export to France. My wife and I had seen their pineapples on sale in Paris for the equivalent of $U.S.33 per six-ounce bottle. I did not realize, until then, that they were grown in Guyana.
It soon struck me that Essequibo’s relative isolation and neglect by the colonial and then post-independence governments were blessings in disguise. Apart from a slow old ferry, the only available transportation to the coast and across the mouth of the Essequibo River were small privately owned uncovered speedboats from Parika Stelling. This “undeveloped” transportation infrastructure forced residents to depend on the region’s natural resource endowment using methods of sustainable production, relatively free from the intrusion of “development” for their livelihood. What a livelihood it was (is?) —dynamic, tranquil, self-sufficient, beautiful, and peaceful. The Essequibo coast is what Guyana could have been.
On July 18,th the MV Barima, the slow ferry, capsized and sank off the Essequibo Coast. Over 100 Guyanese died. The 87 year old boat, in dire need of critical repair, was the major means of transport for the people living in Region One on the Essequibo Coast and in its interior of dense rainforests and along the banks of its multiple rivers. The region is populated predominantly by the very Amerindians who were generating such economic vibrancy at Charity. The tragedy speaks volumes about the economic priorities of Guyana’s governments since independence. The sinking of the ferry occurred in the midst of a transportation infrastructure explosion on the country’s coast. The country’s roads, canals, dykes, bridges, ports, and railways were initially built to service the needs of sugar production on the 15-mile wide coastal plain. This transportation structure expanded qualitatively and quantitatively over time to service the needs of bauxite production with the development of a small up-river port, a bridge, and a railway. Then came an expansion driven by a phenomenal growth in timber production and by industrial production of gold for export. Both marginalized and displaced small-scale, sustainable Amerindian and Black producers of these two products. There was also the significant expansion, particularly of roads, demanded by phenomenal urban and semi-urban growth, particularly in three major administrative and commercial centers of Georgetown, New Amsterdam, and Linden. Agricultural lands have been converted to accommodate a veritable explosion of dormitory suburbs for the middle and upper classes and for export production of timber, gold, and now oil. Relatively little of this has penetrated the Essequibo region and its coast.
When the M V Barima sank, where were the highly sophisticated sea-going vessels and technical equipment used to support and service oil production 120-130 miles offshore for search, rescue and recovery operations? It was a local fisherman who located the ferry’s sunken hull in 50 feet of water some nine miles offshore. Eventually, local and international dive teams were deployed. Meanwhile, oil extraction proceeded apace, undeterred and uninterrupted by one of the worst tragedies that Guyana has ever faced.
The abandonment and marginalization of local indigenous populations engaged in domestic production is par for the course in oil-exporting countries of the Global South. Nigeria used to be food self-sufficient with a significant surplus available to a lucrative food-export sector — until its oil boom. Seduced by economic and policy technocrats and experts using esoteric mumbo-jumbo like “comparative advantage,” “dual economy” “inefficiency,” “marginal product,” the country abandoned domestic production of food for what it became convinced were cheaper imports from industrialized countries. Those engaged in rural agro-production were told they could make much more significant contributions to the country’s economy by working in “downstream” and “upstream” activities in the oil economy. Now the country is faced with an annual food import bill of between U.S. $2.5 billion, and as high as US$10 billion by some estimates. Thirty-five million Nigerians suffer from acute food insecurity while living under bare-life conditions. They are forced to deal with soaring inflation, currency depreciation, and high cost imports, including food and energy (in an oil exporting country). Depopulation of the rural areas has led to massive increases in urban population. Of the 15-18 million residents in the former capital of Lagos, between 8.5 million and 11 million are poor (50%-85%). 300,000 are forced to eke out a living in a “floating slum” built on the water. Overpopulation in the city eventually forced the government to move the capital to Abuja in the center of the country. Is Guyana far behind?
The discovery of oil has catapulted Guyana into a major locus of American investment. It has brought with it a massive influx of foreigners, primarily Americans. In 2018, I was somewhat taken aback by the nearly exclusively white, mostly American, passengers on a Caribbean Airlines flight that was usually filled with Trinidadians and Guyanese. The presence of these high earning Americans and other expatriates has engendered a phenomenal and unbearable inflationary spiral in rental and home prices, food and basic wage goods, hotel and guest house rates, transportation, services, etc. They are shifting consumption patterns away from domestic sources. An influx of foreign-owned businesses caters to their tastes and needs. Additionally, a small number of local crony capitalists, flush with extraordinary wealth from patronage-driven access to public and private sector contracts, are engaged in speculative acquisition of a phenomenal amount of local assets, driving prices up even further. The professional class is abandoning their local clients for much more lucrative opportunities in service of the needs of the expatriate driven oil-export economy. Meanwhile, the Guyanese majority is left to struggle to survive, many living sheer lives of desperation, because they are not useable or useful to the petro-state.
All of this was anticipated by the leaders of the nationalist democratic socialist PPP when the party was formed in 1950. Claims of “communism” were used to secure its ouster after it won elections in 1953, 1957 and 1961. Now here is the irony. On January 1st, 2026, Zorhran Kwame Mamdani, an African-born, South Asian Muslim became the 112th Mayor of New York, the richest city in the world, with over 380,000 millionaires, 66 billionaires and a population with a net worth of over U.S. $3 trillion. He is a declared member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose stated goal is social ownership and democratic control of the American economy. Mamdani is backed by the American Progressive Movement that opposes neoliberal capitalism and advocates for worker management of the public sector. His victory is a portent of a radical wave sweeping America. Democratic socialist candidates are winning elections throughout the country with support from 32 percent of Americans, more than the 29% who are members of the Democratic Party and the 28% who are Republicans. Americans on both the right and left side of the ideological spectrum are in a state of revolt. Right wing supporters of President Donald Trump—The Make America Great Again crowd (MAGA)– are blaming the rich and the professional and managerial classes for a generalized economic decline that began during the seventies. They demand withdrawal from the global capitalist order that was established by their country, the adoption of America First policies, particularly in the economy, and white ethno-nationalism as the solutions to their crisis. The left blames the system of global capital and the “one percent” of millionaire and billionaire plutocrats for the American crisis. They demand transition to socialism as the solution. Both groups point to the same thing—an economic crisis engendered by global capitalist plutocrats who have destroyed the domestic goods and service economy while shipping manufacturing jobs and the production of goods and services overseas. They blame the takeover of their country’s economy and politics by an economic and technocratic elite for their suffering. Access to health care is unaffordable for many. Hospitals and clinics are closing in rural areas. Medical debt has become the major cause of bankruptcy. A college education is increasingly out of reach while most with degrees are forced into a lifetime of debt. Life expectancy is decreasing. The country ranks 49th globally — almost like Cuba which has suffered over sixty years of a devastating US blockade. Homelessness is skyrocketing as rents and the cost of homes spiral and mortgages become unaffordable. Retirees are forced to leave the country if they are to survive on their social security and pension payments. Forty million Americans live below the poverty line, many of them with jobs. Forty percent are unable to cover an additional expense of $400 with cash or savings. Two million persons are incarcerated, the highest in the world, costing the country close to $450 billion per year. The country has close to 45,000 gun deaths every year, the highest in the world. The richest 1 percent owns over 31 percent of the country’s wealth. Drug use and deaths from it are spiraling, as are the rates of suicide.
The irony is that the policies proposed by the pre-independence democratic socialist PPP in Guyana are milder versions of those currently being advocated by both the right and left in the United States today– democratic socialism, national ownership of assets, domestic self-sufficiency for feeding, clothing, and housing its population. American intervention and sanctions prevented their implementation in Guyana at the cost of the destruction of its political economy. Guyana became known internationally as the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Now, a different type of intervention by American oil oligarchs is driving Guyana, pell-mell, into the ranks of the states of countries in the Global South suffering from perpetual and unmanageable crises and economic and political collapse because of Euro-American intervention and policies. Dr. Cheddi Jagan is weeping in his grave to see what the party that he co-formed and co-led has unleashed in the country he so loved.
Discussion