Surinam: It's Oil and Farming vs Rain Forests

In Suriname, It’s Oil and Farming Versus the Rainforests SURINAME Suriname A few years ago, a plan to move more than 1,000 Mennonite families from Belize to Suriname to establish massive farming communities in a heavily forested area seemed like a good idea. The small country off the northeastern coast of South America had wanted to increase its domestic food production and the conservative Christian group was well known for its agricultural savvy across Central and South America. However, the plan soon faced a backlash: Critics worried that such a development would threaten Indigenous communities and lead to mass deforestation in a country that has one of the largest rainforests in the world – it covers 93 percent of its land. “We live off the forest and rivers … How will we live then?” Remon Clemens, grand chief of the Kwinti Maroon community, which descends from enslaved Africans, told the Guardian in 2023 about the idea after he learned of it. Soon after, protests broke out and Suriname canceled the Mennonite settlement program. But earlier this year, private investors revived efforts to bring in Mennonites, again unleashing a backlash over the threats to ancestral tribal lands and to the environment. In August, the government stepped in. President Jennifer Geerlings-Simons announced a crackdown on unauthorized agricultural settlements, including those established by Mennonites. “We also have the issue that people have come into our country, go inland and started cutting down our forests … and plan to cut down even more,” Geerlings-Simons said. “The people who are active there in the interior and have cleared land to live there, are there illegally. And that means that we’re going to take measures against them.” Still, evicting settlers and taking back land doesn’t solve a fundamental dilemma the country is now facing: How to develop itself and meet its population’s needs while also preserving its natural heritage and the benefits that arise from it. Currently, Suriname, a country of roughly 640,000 people, is preparing for an oil boom. Its offshore discoveries, beginning in 2020, have attracted major international energy companies and led to hopes that the Surinamese will follow in the footsteps of neighboring Guyana: There, gross domestic product per capita increased 45 percent in 2024 to almost $30,000 annually, more than four times greater than Suriname’s $7,000 per capita that year. French energy giant TotalEnergies and its partners are investing an estimated $12 billion in GranMorgu, a deepwater oilfield development. Production is scheduled to begin in mid-2028 and it is projected to pump as much as 220,000 barrels per day from offshore fields containing 760 million barrels in total. The IMF forecasts economic growth of around 30 percent that year. The timing couldn’t be better: The conflict in the Middle East has highlighted the risks of relying on supplies from the Persian Gulf. The government is planning to invest future petroleum revenues in everything from education to infrastructure but particularly in agriculture to boost food production and exports. But expanding farmland could destroy rainforests, which in turn would threaten its carbon-negative status and its plans to earn revenue from carbon credits it would receive from protecting its carbon-absorbing forests. Suriname has lost about 1.5 percent of its forest cover since 2000, according to Grist, a US nonprofit environmental news organization. “If left unchecked, deforestation could threaten the country’s carbon-negative status sometime in the next decade,” it said. For Suriname, the challenge is turning the windfall into a diversified economy and lasting prosperity while also protecting its slice of the Amazon. Geerlings-Simons said as much even as she and other officials are convinced they will be able to balance the competing priorities, with effort and time even if it is a long and complicated process. “The problems of the country are enormous,” she told Americas Quarterly, a US magazine that covers Central and South America. “The time we have to prevent a resource curse is very short. I can’t turn a mud puddle into a glass of water in just one step.”