91av

ONE of the Caribbean’s last jungles could soon echo to the sound of rocket
launches. Guyana has agreed to sell a large tract of pristine swampy rainforest
to a Texan rocket-launch company, Beal Aerospace, for just $7.50 a
hectare.

The deal, signed last month, replaces Beal’s original plan to build its
$250 million launch pad on the Caribbean island of Sombrero in Anguilla,
which angered environmental scientists
(91av, 12 February, p 22).
Guyanese prime minister Samuel Hinds hailed the project—which could
see more than 20 commercial satellite launches a year—as “a quantum leap
for Guyana into the new millennium”.

But critics say the country will gain little economically, while rainforest
dwellers will be thrown out of their homes, swamps drained, forests cut down and
ancient archaeological remains trashed.

In the US, Beal Aerospace is testing 70-metre rockets fuelled with a mix of
aviation fuel and hydrogen peroxide, which will carry 5-tonne payloads. The
vice-president of Beal, David Spoede, says the company hopes to be launching
from the site in Guyana in three to four years’ time. Guyana is close to the
equator, which is the best place to launch satellites into geostationary orbit
above the equator. The European Space Agency’s spaceport is in nearby French
Guiana. From Guyana, the launch route eastwards will be over open ocean in case
of mishaps.

Beal plans to buy, then partially drain, 100 square kilometres of swamp on
the north bank of the River Waini and lease from Guyana a buffer zone three
times as large. Hinds calls the site “generally unproductive land never before
commercially utilised”. But the deal documents acknowledge that up to 54
families living there would have to be moved. Sharon Atkinson of the Amerindian
Peoples’ Association in Guyana says many others will lose their right to hunt,
fish and gather thatch and timber there.

The launch area is part of the homeland of the Warao people, whose
settlements date back 7000 years and are only now being excavated. “Building a
rocket launch site will very probably destroy the archaeological record here
before it has been fully explored,” says Terry Roopnaraine, a Guyanese
anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. The World Monuments Fund in New
York recently placed the area on its list of the hundred most endangered
archaeological sites.

The large exclusion zone around the launch site would also disrupt harvesting
of the Waini basin’s rich supplies of manicole “heart of palm”. Amerindians
harvest more than 2 million palm stems from the basin annually and sell them to
a French canning company for sale in Europe.

Spoede responds to these concerns by saying that the project will only go
ahead if an environmental impact assessment, which is about to start, proves
acceptable to both sides. But he adds that drainage work would probably begin in
six months, before completion of the assessment. Many Amerindians have backed
the scheme, says Spoede. “They want job opportunities for themselves and their
children,” he told 91av.