Guyana has 5.8 million hectares of grassland and imports 30% of its food despite being South America's most forested nation.¹

The discovery of oil in the Stabroek Block in 2015 by ExxonMobil fundamentally altered Guyana's trajectory. GDP doubled almost overnight. By 2024, production reached 645,000 barrels per day, making Guyana the highest GDP-per-capita growth nation on Earth. But beneath the petroleum windfall lurks the same disease that hollowed out Trinidad's agriculture: Dutch Disease. Currency appreciation and labour migration from farms to oil services are already depressing traditional agriculture. The nation now faces a critical choice: repeat T&T's mistake, or use oil wealth to build agricultural resilience.

Guyana's 82% forest cover — the highest in the Western Hemisphere — is a globally significant carbon asset that MUST stay protected. The Iwokrama International Centre for Rainforest Conservation, a world-renowned 371,000-hectare reserve in the heart of the country, demonstrates that forest conservation and sustainable development can coexist. Any agricultural activation must follow this principle: expand on the coast and savannahs, never into the forest.

The Demerara-Mahaica coastal plain (Region 4) contains some of the richest farmland in South America — alluvial soils deposited over millennia by the Demerara and Mahaica rivers. This narrow coastal strip, protected by a Dutch colonial system of sea walls and polders dating back to 1616, produces virtually all of Guyana's rice and sugar. Yet GuySuCo (Guyana Sugar Corporation) collapsed in 2017, with multiple estates closing and thousands of workers displaced. Former sugar estates now sit idle — visible as grassland in our satellite data.

As CARICOM's largest land mass by far — 215,000 km² with the lowest population density in the Caribbean — Guyana is the natural breadbasket of the entire Caribbean region. It could feed every CARICOM nation. The Rupununi savannahs (Region 9) alone hold 2.55 million hectares of grassland. With oil revenues available to fund diversification, NAREI providing research capacity, and satellite intelligence to guide precision deployment, Guyana can break the Dutch Disease cycle that destroyed T&T's agriculture.

From Dutch colony in 1616, through British Guiana (1831), independence in 1966, republic in 1980, and the transformative oil discovery of 2015 — Guyana has reinvented itself repeatedly. Oil production began in 2020. The question is whether this generation will use petroleum wealth to build a food-secure nation, or squander it as Trinidad did.