APOSTLE LYNROY SCANTLEBURY of World Harvest Missionaries International may be on track with his vision that Barbados’ future lies in oil – but not necessarily because of a nationalistic bias in Heaven.
The Caribbean Plate is a crust of oceanic tectonic mass underlying Central America and the Caribbean off the north coast of South America. With Mexico on the west, Venezuela, Trinidad, Guyana on the south . . . yes, Barbados on the eastern edge and Haiti to the north, the regions within the plate’s arch are prone to have intense seismic activity, including frequent earthquakes, occasional tsunamis and volcanic eruptions . . . and oil.
There’s therefore a better than even chance that there will be large oil deposits waiting to be mined within Barbados’ territorial waters. The rich Mexican and Venezuelan petroleum fields possibly result from a complex millennium-long shifting of the plate, which is apparently moving eastward about 22 millimetres per year vis-a-vis the South American Plate.
We will all be oil workers then – having at last succeeded in shucking off what little we offer as a tourism destination. Most of our visitors will then be roughneck oil rig workers; we’ll of course all need to give up a day at the beach because the sea coast will be eyelined with smelly pitch mingled with Sargassum.
The crop will really be “over” then – all local agriculture having given way to precast earthquake-and-tsunami resistant skyscrapers.
Barbados doesn’t have many economic development options to play with so we’ll have to hope that we can count on our natural resources. But we should be careful which resources we pray for!
– LEE FARNUM-BADLEY
