Neighbouring Suriname is reportedly having its own fair share of woes arising out of the seasonal rains with which countries in South America are all too familiar.
Reports surfaced earlier this week that Guyana’s neighbour to the east has had to summon an emergency team from the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Manage-ment Agency (CDEMA) to support the country’s res-ponse to this year’s heavy flooding. Reports say that the focus of the CDEMA team’s mission will be on assessing the physical impact of the recent customary seasonal rainfall in the region.
Just over a week ago the country’s president, Chandrikapersad Santokhi, announced to the nation that several districts of the country in the interior and southern areas had been severely affected by continuous rainfall which began more than two months ago.
Seasonal rainfall and its effects are occurrences which Suriname share with Guyana, some of the specific consequences being significant losses to floodwaters in the countries’ agricultural sectors, as well as destruction of roads, serious damage to homes, displacement of families and the necessity to pour significant amounts of resources into emergency relief and repairs’ responses.
The CDEMA functionaries named as part of the Trini-dad and Tobago-based response team are the Agency’s Programme Manager, Preparedness and Response, Joanne Persad and Navindra Persad from the entity’s Disaster Preparedness Office in Trinidad and Tobago. The visit, reportedly, will seek to trigger a response which will, a priori, determine and afterwards respond to targeted humanitarian needs.
Following the declaration from President Santokhi, CDEMA activated a high-level meeting attended by its international partner donors operating in the region, where more than a dozen pledged humanitarian assistance to the Suriname people.
In neighbouring Guyana, the government has already broken the grim news that this year’s weather-related floods are likely to realise a level of intensity similar to that seen last year when thousands of households in communities across the country were severely affected.
Days ago, news surfaced that residents of the Region Ten community of Kwakwani have been receiving official advice to embrace relocation options in circumstances where the already seriously rain-affected community reportedly faces the imminent threat of further heavy rainfall and attendant flooding.
The authorities here are also likely to be gearing themselves to respond to what, over the years, has been the routine seasonal heavy rainfall in interior regions of the country, where a lack of access to nearby emergency response facilities aggravates the situation.
Seasonal heavy rainfall also leaves its mark on the country’s economy by devastating huge swathes of farmland across the country, creating serious shortages of agricultural produce that result in protracted periods of price rises of fresh vegetables, fruit that create knock-on scarcities in the related agro processing sector.
One question that arises in both Guyana and Suriname is whether and how quickly the two countries will seek to invest significant portions of their oil & gas earnings to strengthen infrastructure that will help mitigate against what, over the years, has become the draining socio-economic consequences of flooding.
