Guyana Flexes Its Diplomatic Muscles as U.N. Security Council President | Opinion

President Irfaan Ali of Guyana speaks during an interview with Newsweek on Feb. 12, 2024, in New York City.

Across energy and financial markets, there have been billions of reasons to pay a lot of attention to Guyana in recent years—11 billion reasons to be more precise because that’s the estimated number of recoverable barrels of oil that sit in Guyana’s offshore waters. These finds have catapulted tiny Guyana in South America’s northern coast, with a population less than 900,000, into the upper echelons of the world’s most prolific oil producers. And with these massive reserves—already the country has the second highest number of barrels per capita in the world, ahead of heavyweights like Saudi Arabia and Qatar—Guyana is beginning to flex its muscles on the global diplomatic stage, highlighting important issues that have been ignored for far too long by traditional powers. Unlike so many other small oil-rich states that have been somewhat content to sit back and just cash checks from the deals they cut with foreign oil companies, Guyana is leveraging its economic mojo and transforming it into effective diplomatic soft power on the global stage.

Case in point: This February, the country assumed the presidency of the highly consequential United Nations Security Council, where it is serving as a non-permanent member through the end of 2025. One might think that the country would have used this vaunted position to help address the unsettling saber-rattling by its neighbor to the west, Venezuela, which has made some fanciful claims that it is the rightful owner of nearly two-thirds of Guyana’s lands. But Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali views Guyana’s influence not through the narrow lens of today, but rather longitudinally.

Instead of focusing on Guyana’s own parochial and immediate interests, Ali opted to use his country’s platform on the world stage to address a pair of issues that that are far more expansive in their implications—and ones that affect hundreds of millions of people across dozens of countries: food security as a driver of increased global conflict and the detrimental environmental byproduct of global conflict.

“Very limited attention is placed on long-term issues, for example, on the impact on food, the impact on the environment, the impact on arable lands, the impact on the displacement of people. You have tens of millions of people who are displaced [by war and conflict],” President Ali told Newsweek. “Refugee camps lead to health issues, issues of food security, vulnerability, inequality and social injustices … when we look at conflicts and wars, we pay very little attention to the damaging effects, the long-term effects.”

Ali sees poverty and malnutrition as top security issues that deserve more sunlight in international forums because they are either the root cause, or highly contributing vectors to so much of the political instability and conflict across the globe. And this leads to Ali’s second major point—that these conflicts leave in their wake an immense environmental impact. And he is right—conflicts devastate habitats, extinguish wildlife, produce pollution, and completely reshape ecosystems, resulting in repercussions that reverberate for decades.

“We want to use this period of our [U.N.] presidency to not only highlight the effects of conflict and war and the immediate action that is required globally, but for us to bring to the fore the consequences on the environment and food security that are ultimately critically integrated and linked into the prosperity of people and their ability to live a comfortable and rewarding life in the future,” added Ali.

Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Guyana’s permanent representative of Guyana to the United Nations, believes that President Ali’s message was well-received by her colleagues and as well as the international community at the U.N. on Feb. 14.

“The Security Council has a responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. This means it must not only treat conflicts when they occur but also work to prevent them, including by considering the root causes. Too often the Council is in reactive mode,” she told Newsweek. “What President Ali did was challenge the global community by saying that both food insecurity and the impacts of climate change must be considered as paramount to avoiding and mitigating armed conflict. Moreover, for all our efforts to meet the Sustainability Development Goals, we need to be much more cognizant that among its many harmful impacts, climate change is also a driver of conflict. It undermines our ability to reach those goals in more ways than one.”

To commemorate Guyana’s ascension to the presidency of the U.N. Security Council, Ali presented a report entitled, The Cost of War and Conflict to the Environment and Food Security, and chaired a high-level debate on the matter which included U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, both of which were well received.

Now we can only hope that world is listening and ready to do something about these important messages being raised by Guyana.

Arick Wierson is a six-time Emmy Award-winning television producer and served as a senior media and political adviser to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He advises corporate clients on communications strategies in the United States, Africa, and Latin America.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.

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