Starting a few months ago, a group of Indigenous, African and Indian Guyanese women from Regions 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 have been meeting to talk about oil.
As always, we ground these teachings in our own experiences, they said. “This is why we started our conversations by talking about where we are seeing the effects of the oil economy directly, and that is in the increased cost of living and what it is doing to our household budgets.”
Last week Friday, Demerara Waves carried a story in which Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha claimed that it is climate change and not the oil and gas industry that is leading to the decreased supply of fish, and the Minister said that a study by the Food and Agriculture Organisation supported this finding.
As grassroots women, we looked at our budgets, at what we are seeing in our communities, and we also visited fishing areas (some of us actually live there) and spoke with fishermen. Some of us live with people who depend on the sea for their livelihood. These are the people who are making the connections between oil drilling and our environment. So here are our questions to the Honorable Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha and to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO):
Can the FAO publicly confirm the Minister’s statement that based on their study, it is climate change and not the oil and gas industry that has caused the current decline in fish catches in Guyana? The FAO has not said anything so far. Does that mean that this is in fact the conclusion of their study?
Is the oil and gas industry not one of the major contributors to climate change anyway?
When was the FAO study done?
Who exactly did the FAO speak to in order to come up with this study that the Government of Guyana is drawing on and which lets the oil and gas industry off the hook? All of the fisherfolk we spoke to are saying differently. How was their knowledge counted? Did the FAO researchers speak to fisherfolk and their families, and if so, how many, over what time period and across which communities in Guyana?