At one time we lived on a gentle hillside bordering the quiet, southern bay of Trinidad with stunning panoramic views of the curved coast.
Shortly after moving into the older house in the small coastal community, we realized that on a clear day if we used the peer ladder via the narrow, high-ceilinged insert, we could see straight into one of the four Mouths of Dragons or Bocas del Dragón, the west-to-east channels, which separate the Gulf of Pariah from the Caribbean Sea, a linguistic mark for the country’s Spanish heritage.
Uncontrolled by the risk of stilt-walking cruisers or ninja raiders, we knocked out the concrete wall and installed a large but forbidden size window, where salty breezes swept in from the shaded Gulf.
The shallow inland harbor extends past the small island of Chacachacare, which has, variously, served as a revolutionary base, a cotton plantation, a whaling station, a leper colony and now a haven for illegal migrants, and the northeastern coast of their collapse. the homeland of Venezuela.
Named for its teeth-like rocky islands, the Boca Grande or Grand Boca, is a rough 12-mile / 20-kilometer wide strait that makes me sick of the sea to remember, after sitting there, frozen and nausea, with our two young, happy ones. children, in a rocking pirogue, as my husband fished hard in the deep waters.
Christopher Columbus allegedly called Chacacha-care, “Port of Cats” because, in his opinion, he heard the calls of wild felines while mistaking the howler of howler monkeys. I was, too noisy, though with déjà vu and roared with anger, when I learned that the Progressive Party / Civic Party Government (PPP / C) was barely seven months ago to rummage around and the ugly habits that led to the eventual loss of power in 2015.
A stink of secrecy has given controversial impetus to issue new fishing licenses to a mysterious disguised foreman, Rampersaud Sookhdeo, with suspected Chinese financial backing, who is allegedly the re-migrant head of the still-unknown Haseeb Enterprises there is no evidence of it, therefore. as much as an old fish scale, we can find it here at its alleged base of Trinidad and Tobago. It struck another stink in February with the embarrassing diplomatic volte face that saw the administration publicly scourged by the Communist arch-communist, for a bizarre announcement by the United States Embassy for an office in Taiwan here. Of course, no one claimed official responsibility or prior knowledge in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where we have a full Minister and a Foreign Secretary with a powerful connection.
Even as it rushes within hours to deny Taiwan’s report, the Government is gaining sporadic support for the convenient concept of democracy and democracies, following a decisive rejection of last year’s long-executed vote by its predecessor, the fast since that. – a Partnership for National Unity coalition led by the ineffective Opposition National Congress and the dying Alliance for Change.
Sunday night, the execution of a suspected gold dealer street Ricardo Fagundes renewed fears about an upcoming organized criminal bloodshed. The routine suddenly announced through a terse media release, on Tuesday, a private opening, safe away from the busy press, a Chinese-owned seafood factory, by the aptly named Grandeast Incorporated, seen by none other than the esteemed Foreigner. Secretary, Robert Persaud and Minister of Agriculture, Zulfikar Mustapha, praise the company for investing US $ 25M in the Garden-of-Eden apt factory, and boast that large quantities of Guyanese shrimp are going to the People’s Republic. Naturally, this is only the first of three steps and the Chinese boss admitted that the company wants to expand and will need even more product.
Beijing, currently ruffled, clearly knows where the true PPP / C, financial, family and political allegiance really lies, even though most of our diaspora is located obviously in North America and not in Nanjing.
In fact all the output from Fujian’s newest branch of Fuzhou Hongpu Aquatic Products, where per capita seafood consumption exceeds 25 kg, is for export to the homeland of Asia. China is a huge insatiable market of one billion people, with hungry buyers devouring the largest amount of seafood in the world, nearly half, or at least 65M tonnes, of total annual volume, and it also imports most. The impact on Guyanese who have enjoyed the bounty of cheap seafood as an easy source of protein, will soon be apparent in our purses, pockets, pots and plates.
Increasing consumer demand and purchasing power, coupled with inadequate domestic produce and tired fishing grounds at home, mean that the cash-strapped Chinese are pursuing such projects in resource-rich, easy-to-access nations exploitation like ours. Through the Belt and Road scheme, China can fund huge investments that exploit wild stocks and aquaculture in the unique economic zones of other nations, Stockholm’s Resilience Center noted, warning of the risks that stocks could be poorly managed, especially in developing countries with weak governance. Cue Guyana and its biggest bilateral creditor.
The Center predicts that by 2030, China alone will need an additional 6-18M tonnes of seafood to meet anticipated domestic consumption. How long from now, before we have five other licenses traditionally transferred and further converted our finfish stocks into fishmeal for aquaculture, by a foreign country with woeful environmental, democratic and human rights records? Is the factory waste dumped into the Demerara River? Surely the mighty armada of Chinese fishing vessels could end not only in Galapagos waters, but along our own Atlantic shorelines, given the sinister direction of this Government, and the hundreds of thousands of ever-propelled dredgers by Beijing.
In January this year, the Guyana Seafood Merchants and Processors Owners Association (GATOSP) urged the Minister of Agriculture, to investigate the low level of catches. It was reported that the group’s President Ruben Charles said during a meeting:
“Our organization… is experiencing some difficulty now in terms of catch levels and members… with no scientific guidance… attribute that to oil drilling (by ExxonMobil) out there. One of the things we would look for is to see how we can do some investigation to test whether that is the case. “No word yet.
In June 2020, China’s powerhouse Zijin Mining announced the successful acquisition of the Guyana Goldfields (GG) in Toronto for an all-cash offer of Can $ 323M (US $ 238M), in an acquisition spree, which ended nearly two months still. battle for the company, its main asset being the dispersed and rich Aurora mine in the Cuyuni-Mazaruni where gold was first discovered in 1911. Aurora gold ranges up to an estimated 3.3 million ounces. Since 2015, GG processed 9.79 tonnes of ore, recovering 623,000 ounces of gold value in today’s prices (US $ 1740 an ounce) more than US $ 1B. Also located in Fujian Province, the Zijin international focuses on key metals such as gold, copper and zinc, across 11 countries. Its largest shareholder is the State-owned Shanghang Minxi Xinghang.
If we are to judge from the ill-fated and badly constructed international airport extension project that remains incomplete and an unreasonable burden years after the deadline, I do not need a school to realize that Guyana has gone far to the dangerous mouth of the Red Dragon and nearer the other end.
ID turns to the cautionary tale of the Gulf of Paria, originally known as the Golfo de la Ballena or the Gulf of Whale. The whaling industry of the 19th century eliminated the mammals from the area and populations never recovered, in line with Golfo Triste’s other name, the Gulf of Sadness.