“For Guyana, it would be less a lever of emancipation than a new form of dependence” | EUROtoday

Ln January 29, the Senate will look at a invoice “aimed at lifting, in overseas territories, the ban on research, exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons”. This appears like a siren tune: a seductive discourse, primarily based on illusory guarantees and hiding main dangers, each ecological and democratic.

In 2019, after a number of months of drilling and practically 100 million euros invested, TotalEnergies gave up its explorations off the coast of Kourou (Guyana). Are we to consider that the senator from Guyana Georges Patient – ​​who sits with the Macronists throughout the Rally of Progressive and Independent Democrats –, writer of this invoice, has info that neither multinationals nor previous prospecting would have revealed?

In sixty years of exploitation on French territory, France has extracted round 100 million tonnes of oil, or barely greater than a 12 months of present consumption. Basing an vitality coverage on hypothetical deposits is extra of a mirage than strategic planning. It could be extra critical to put money into the native sectors of the long run: agriculture, fishing, woodworking, renewable energies, ecotourism, all sectors which can be in the present day undervalued and now threatened by these extractive wishes.

Neoliberal imaginative and prescient

The textual content argues that this oil revival would herald 8 billion euros per 12 months to the State and 500 million to Guyana, which might subsequently bear many of the environmental, social and well being dangers to provide oil consumed primarily in France, whereas retaining solely round 6% of tax income.

This logic remembers outdated extractivist patterns: focus of earnings on the heart, externalization of prices to the margins. It relies on a short-term neoliberal imaginative and prescient, which sacrifices the long run habitability of the territory within the identify of a promise of improvement denied by quite a few comparable experiences.

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