Free From Want The Constitutional Argument the Oil Era Demands

 

Sunday Essay · Governance and Transparency

Drawing on Peter Singer’s moral philosophy, this essay argues that Guyana’s oil wealth creates a constitutional obligation for the state to eliminate severe child deprivation.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · May 3, 2026

In the autumn of 1971, with East Bengal disintegrating under cyclone, war, and famine, a young Australian philosopher named Peter Singer sat down to write what would become the most consequential essay in twentieth-century moral philosophy. His proposition was simple, almost banal in its statement and incendiary in its consequence: where it lies within our power to prevent something bad from happening, and where preventing it would not require us to give up anything of comparable moral weight, we are morally required to act. Not commended for acting. Not praised for our generosity. Required.

Consider what this means in everyday life. If you are walking past a shallow pond and see a toddler drowning, you are obligated to wade in and pull the child out. You will ruin your shoes and muddy your clothes, but the cost of dry shoes is not of comparable moral weight to the life of a child. Or suppose you are driving to a movie and see a pedestrian bleeding on the shoulder of the road. You are obligated to stop and drive them to the hospital. You will miss the movie and stain your car’s upholstery, but the price of a ticket and a detailing bill cannot be weighed against preventing a death. In both cases, walking past or driving on is not merely uncharitable; it is a profound moral failure.

The essay’s force did not come from the principle itself, which most people, when pressed, will accept. It came from what the principle does to the moral architecture by which affluent persons license their indifference. If the principle is true, then the line we ordinarily draw between charity — the optional good, the praiseworthy excess — and duty — the minimum required — collapses. What ordinary morality classes as generous becomes obligatory. What we permit ourselves to call prudence becomes complicity. In Guyana in 2026, with an oil fund swelling and children still measured for malnutrition, this is no longer an academic distinction.

Singer was writing about individual donors and distant strangers. The argument has been debated, refined, attacked, and defended for fifty-four years. Demandingness, partiality, the limits of agent-relative permissions, the epistemics of effective giving — the secondary literature is large. What I want to suggest, in this essay, is that the argument has not yet been run in the configuration where it becomes most powerful: not the affluent individual facing distant strangers, but the oil state facing its own children.

This is the configuration in which Guyana now finds itself. And it is the configuration in which our Constitution — properly read — already supplies the doctrinal apparatus that Singer’s moral argument provides.

I. The Transposition

Consider, first, what changes when we shift Singer’s argument from the individual to the state.

The conventional objections to Singer’s principle all run on features of the original case that do not survive the transposition. Distance is the first. Many philosophers have argued that we owe more to those near us than to those far away, that proximity generates obligation in a way that geography does not. Whatever one makes of this — and I think it is largely indefensible — it has no purchase here. The Guyanese state’s relation to its citizens is constitutive. The children malnourished in Mahdia or Buxton or the Pomeroon are not distant strangers. They are the very persons whose well-being the state exists to secure.

Partiality is the second. We are permitted, the argument runs, to weight our own projects, our own children, our own communities more heavily than others. Again, whatever one makes of this in the individual case, it does not transfer. A state is not a person with permissible partialities. Its impartial regard for all its citizens is the condition of its legitimacy.

Causal opacity is the third. The individual donor often cannot be sure her contribution will reach those in need; intermediaries are unreliable; the chain of effect is uncertain. None of this applies to a state with a sovereign wealth fund and a Treasury. The chain from receipt to expenditure runs through institutions the state itself controls.

When we run Singer’s argument with the agent as state, the suffering as internal, and the affluence as sudden and extractive — discovered, not earned — the objections evaporate. What remains is the bare collapse: with the resources to prevent specific, identified, locally-measurable forms of deprivation, the failure to prevent them is not a failure of pace. It is a wrong of the same structural class as the affluent diner stepping past the drowning child.

When we run Singer’s argument with the agent as state, the suffering as internal, and the affluence as sudden and extractive — discovered, not earned — the objections evaporate.

This is the moral premise. Now to the empirical situation against which it must be measured.

II. The Ledger

By the end of 2025, the Natural Resource Fund (NRF) held a balance of approximately US$3.25 billion, a figure the Senior Finance Minister presented to Parliament as evidence of sound stewardship.^[1] Withdrawals approved for fiscal year 2025 amounted to US$2.463 billion.^[1] A further US$2.37 billion withdrawal is contemplated for 2026.^[2] Production at the Stabroek Block reached approximately 716,000 barrels per day in 2025, climbing toward 920,000 in early 2026 with the addition of the One Guyana FPSO, and toward an aspirational 1.7 million by 2030.^[3][4] The 2026 national budget, the largest in our history, totals GY$1.558 trillion, or roughly US$7.48 billion. Oil revenues for 2026 are projected at US$2.79 billion.

These are extraordinary numbers, more extraordinary still when weighed against the human ledger that runs alongside them. In late 2025, Guyana officially became the world’s largest oil producer on a per capita basis, producing approximately 1.15 barrels per day for every citizen.^[5] This far exceeds the per capita production of established petrostates like Kuwait (~0.5 bpd/person) or the United Arab Emirates (~0.4 bpd/person).

Yet, the 2024 UNICEF report finds that twenty percent of Guyanese children consume only two food groups daily — the technical threshold for severe food poverty — and forty percent fall into the moderate band.^[6] Stunting affects 9.1 percent of children under five nationally, but this masks severe regional disparities; Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) data reveals that among Indigenous children in the interior, stunting reaches 21.3 to 25 percent.^[7][8] Wasting persists at 6.4 percent, against a Latin American and Caribbean regional average of just 1.3 percent.^[9] Low-birth-weight prevalence, at 15.6 percent, is the highest in the Pan American Health Organization region and has shown no progress since 2000.^[8] The World Bank’s poverty estimate for Guyana remains, as of this writing, forty-eight percent — a figure the government disputes but has not, through any published methodology, displaced.^[10]

It is tempting to read these two ledgers sequentially: first the oil wealth, then, in time, the development gains. This is the framing the political class prefers. The administration has linked NRF withdrawals to the National Development Strategy, the Poverty Reduction Strategy, and the Low-Carbon Development Strategy; the ministerial talking points emphasize highways, bridges, sea defences, the Gas-to-Energy project, and direct cash transfers. The implicit promise is patience: the wealth has arrived, the deployment is rational, the human indicators will follow.

This is the framing Singer’s argument refuses standing. The economic boom has not yet translated into nutritional improvement. While real GDP growth reached a staggering 62.3 percent in 2022 and 43.5 percent in 2024, the child wasting rate has remained stubbornly flat at 6.4 percent.^[11][8]

The relevant question is not whether the human indicators will follow in time. The relevant question is whether the resources to eliminate the most severe deprivations exist now, and whether their elimination would require sacrificing anything of comparable moral weight. The answer to both questions is plainly yes and plainly no, respectively.

The cost of fully eliminating severe child food poverty in Guyana is small against the scale of NRF receipts, and the arithmetic is worth doing in plain view. Guyana has roughly 80,000 children under five; if 20 percent meet the UNICEF severe food poverty threshold, that is approximately 16,000 children. Comprehensive nutritional intervention — school and clinic feeding, family food assistance, micronutrient supplementation, and community-based management of acute malnutrition (CMAM) — runs internationally in the range of US$300 to US$1,000 per child per year, depending on the package.^[12] The annual cost of fully eliminating severe child food poverty in Guyana, on these conservative estimates, is therefore in the range of US$4.8 to US$16 million.

NRF inflows in just the first quarter of 2026 totalled approximately US$761.7 million.^[13] The full intervention would cost roughly 2 percent of a single quarter’s NRF inflows — or, set against the total deposits Guyana received in fiscal year 2025, less than two-thirds of one percent.

GBJ Data Note: Guyana’s NRF held US$3.25 billion by end of 2025, yet 20% of Guyanese children suffer severe food poverty, and the child wasting rate remains stubbornly flat at 6.4% despite massive GDP growth.

The relevant question is not whether the human indicators will follow in time. The relevant question is whether the resources to eliminate the most severe deprivations exist now, and whether their elimination would require sacrificing anything of comparable moral weight.

III. The Misreading

The natural place to seek a constitutional check on this default is Article 13 of the Constitution, the article most cited in our public discourse on questions of state-citizen relation. It reads:

This is the article that has carried our constitutional argument for two and a half decades. It was assented to by President Jagdeo in 2001. It has been invoked by every civic organization that has sought to lever the state into broader consultation, including the Article 13 group launched in 2021 to push for inclusionary democracy and good governance. It is the article that has been said to bind the state to an architecture of participation.

It will not bear the weight we have asked it to carry. Article 13, properly read, is procedural, not substantive. Its grammar is the grammar of opportunity, participation, decision-making process. It does not, in terms, entitle anyone to anything except inclusion in the making of decisions. It is also located in Chapter II of the Constitution, the directive-principles chapter, where Article 39(1) makes the enforceability of every Chapter II principle conditional on enabling legislation that Parliament may — not shall — enact. In April 2022, the Attorney General publicly declared that Article 13 cannot be enforced and that there is no legal obligation on a government to consult anyone before legislating. On a narrow textualist reading of Article 13 alone, that position is defensible.

I want to suggest, with some care, that this is not because Article 13 is empty. It is because Article 13 has been asked to do work that another article was drafted to do. The procedural mechanism has been invoked where the substantive entitlement is the right vehicle. We have been quoting the wrong provision.

IV. The Under-Read Right

The provision we should have been quoting is Article 40(1), the opening clause of Chapter III, the chapter on Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. It reads:

Three features of this provision deserve close attention. The first is its location. Article 40(1) sits in Chapter III, not Chapter II. It is not a directive principle. It is not subject to Article 39(1)’s permissive enforceability clause. It is, by location and by language, a fundamental right of the same constitutional standing as the rights to life, liberty, conscience, and equal protection. Its enforceability is presumptive, not conditional.

The second is its substantive content. Where Article 13 speaks of opportunities for participation, Article 40(1) speaks of freedom from hunger, ignorance, and want. This is not a procedural directive. It is the substantive welfare claim, drafted in language that tracks Roosevelt’s 1941 Four Freedoms address and the Universal Declaration’s Article 25. The Food and Agriculture Organization has formally identified this provision as one of fewer than two dozen explicit constitutional rights to food in the world.

The third is its strength. The phrase basic right, combined with every person, combined with the inclusion of hunger alongside ignorance and want, gives Article 40(1) a textual strength that the directive principles do not possess. It is not framed as a goal toward which the state shall progressively work. It is framed as an entitlement.

We have been citing the procedural article and missing the substantive one. The political class has been answering the procedural question and dodging the substantive one. We have been quoting the wrong provision.

V. The Bridge

Article 40(1) does not stand alone. It is interpreted, by constitutional command, in conjunction with Article 39(2):

Guyana is a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Covenant’s Article 11 elaborates the right to adequate food, clothing, and housing. The Covenant’s General Comment 12, issued by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, develops the doctrine of progressive realisation and the test of maximum available resources. The Maximum Available Resources test is not a legal technicality. It is the doctrinal translation of a question every citizen can understand: given what you have, what have you chosen not to do? The Covenant’s prohibition on deliberately retrogressive measures establishes, further, that a state which has reached a given level of welfare provision may not, absent extraordinary justification, fall below it.

Article 39(2) makes these doctrines domestically operative as interpretive resources. A Guyanese court, asked whether Article 40(1)’s right to be free from hunger has been honoured, must read that question with due regard to ICESCR’s elaboration of the right. The Maximum Available Resources test becomes, by constitutional bridge, the doctrinal vehicle through which Article 40(1)’s substantive content is given operational meaning.

And here the convergence with Singer’s principle is almost exact. The Maximum Available Resources test asks whether a state has used the maximum of what is available to progressively realize the substantive right. Singer’s principle asks whether the agent has prevented preventable suffering up to the point where prevention would require sacrificing something of comparable moral weight. These are not identical tests, but they are mutually reinforcing, and they converge on the same Guyanese question: with US$3.25 billion in the Fund, US$2.79 billion in projected 2026 oil receipts, a US$7.48 billion national budget, and severe child food poverty unaddressed, can the state credibly claim to have deployed its maximum available resources?

The answer is plainly no.

VI. The Plantation Refraction

I want to step back, briefly, from the constitutional argument to a deeper question — one that Lloyd Best and George Beckford framed for us four decades before the Stabroek Block was discovered.

Best and Beckford’s contribution, in the plantation-economy literature, was to historicize the very distinction between the supererogatory and the obligatory in Caribbean political life. In the plantation regime, the basic survival of the labouring population was discursively coded as a gift from the planter class — provision grounds, allowances, “consideration.” This was not generosity in any meaningful sense; it was the minimum required to keep labour reproducing for the next generation of cane. But the coding of these provisions as charitable, rather than as owed, was constitutive of the regime. The planter who fed his enslaved labourers was praised for his benevolence. The planter who did not was unfortunate, perhaps, but not criminal.

The post-independence state, in Best’s reading, inherits this discursive structure even when it formally rejects it. Welfare provision is announced as the state’s gift to its citizens — direct cash transfers, school feeding programmes, pension top-ups — rather than as the state’s obligation under the social contract that legitimates its existence. The annual budget is presented as a generous distribution from a wise sovereign, not as the discharge of a constitutional duty. The supererogatory framing of basic provision is, on this analysis, the plantation economy’s most durable export.

Singer’s collapse of the supererogatory/obligatory distinction does in moral philosophy what Best and Rodney did in historical political economy: it refuses the discursive coding by which structural duty is transmuted into voluntary largesse. The Guyanese constitution, read through Article 40(1) and Article 39(2), does the same work in domestic constitutional law. The convergence is not accidental. The framers of our 1980 Constitution — and the reformers who, in 2000–2003, strengthened the directive principles and the international-law bridge — were operating in the intellectual aftermath of the plantation-economy critique. They built into the constitutional text the substantive right to freedom from want precisely because they understood the colonial trick of converting obligation into gift, and they meant to forestall it.

What they could not have anticipated is that the resources to deliver the right would arrive, suddenly, beneath the seabed. The Singer transposition is the moral argument that closes the loop the framers left open.

VII. The Test Case

It follows from all of this that the constitutional argument has not been pressed because the public discourse has not understood which provision to press. The question, in the plainest terms, is whether a Guyanese court can be asked to compel the state to deliver on Article 40(1), and if so, what relief such a court could order.

I want to be careful here. I am not a constitutional lawyer; I am a mathematician who has spent a quarter-century thinking about the political economy of my country. But the structure of the legal argument is now clear enough to state.

A constitutional motion under Article 153, the fundamental-rights enforcement provision, brought on behalf of a class of children meeting the UNICEF severe-food-poverty threshold, anchored in Article 40(1), invoking Article 39(2) for ICESCR-informed interpretation, and citing Article 13 for the procedural defect in NRF governance, is a coherent legal posture. The relief sought might be a declaration that the state’s deployment of NRF resources has not satisfied the maximum-available-resources test in the face of measurable severe child food poverty; a mandamus directing specific allocations to evidence-based interventions; or a structural interdict requiring periodic reporting to the court on progress. The South African Constitutional Court’s Grootboom and Treatment Action Campaign judgments supply the comparative jurisprudence; the Indian Supreme Court’s Olga Tellis line offers further support; the Caribbean Court of Justice, on appeal, would be obliged to engage the question.

It would not be a guaranteed legal victory. The Caribbean and Commonwealth tradition is cautious about positive socioeconomic-rights enforcement. Justiciability would be contested. The political class — both PPP/C and APNU — would resist. The Attorney General’s existing public position on Article 13 unenforceability, while sidestepped by anchoring the motion in Article 40(1), would generate doctrinal turbulence.

But the question whether such a motion would succeed is not the only question worth asking. The question whether such a motion would clarify the constitutional doctrine, force the political class to confront the constitutional dimension of NRF deployment, and shift the public discourse onto the right provision is a separate question. And on that second question, the answer is unambiguously yes.

We have spent a generation litigating Article 13 and watching it lose. We have not yet litigated Article 40(1).

VIII. The Project Before Us

There is a way of reading what I have written here as a narrowly legal argument, an exercise in constitutional textualism with a moral philosopher’s flourish. That is not, finally, what it is.

What it is, is a refusal of the framing under which our oil wealth has been managed for the past five years. The framing is one of prudent stewardship, of intergenerational equity, of responsible fiscal management. These phrases are not empty; they correspond to real considerations and to real institutional achievements — the NRF Act of 2021, the Public Accountability and Oversight Committee, the Investment Committee, the criminal penalties for ministerial nondisclosure. The international financial institutions have, on the whole, commended the architecture.

But the framing is also, on the analysis I have offered, the supererogatory framing of obligatory acts. It treats the elimination of severe child food poverty as something the state will get to, in time, when fiscal space and institutional capacity permit. It treats the persistence of stunting and wasting in 2026 — with US$3.25 billion in the Fund and US$2.79 billion in incoming oil receipts — as a regrettable lag rather than as a constitutional default. It permits the political class, of every stripe, to share the discursive position of benefactor relative to citizens whose constitutional entitlement is, in fact, prior.

The Guyanese constitution does not permit this framing. Article 40(1) does not say that every person will eventually be entitled to a life free from hunger. It says they are entitled now. Article 39(2) does not say that the international-law doctrine may guide future jurisprudence. It says that courts shall pay due regard to it in interpreting the present right. Article 13 does not say that citizen participation in well-being decisions might be considered. It says that the principal objective of the political system is to establish such participation.

These are not aspirations. They are constitutional provisions in a constitution that declares itself the supreme law of the land.

The project before us, then, is not the project of asking the state to be generous. It is the project of holding the state to what it has already promised. It is the project of replacing the grammar of fiscal stewardship with the grammar of constitutional duty. It is the project of refusing the plantation economy’s most durable export — the conversion of obligation into gift — in the form it has now taken, where the gift is funded by oil and the obligation is owed to children.

Singer’s principle, transposed to the Guyanese case, is not a foreign moral imposition. It is the philosophical articulation of a principle our own framers wrote into our own Constitution forty-six years ago. We have only to read it.

The wealth is here. The Constitution is here. The children are here.
What remains is not to imagine what we might do, but to account for what we have not done.

---

References

1. Newsroom Guyana. “BUDGET 2026: With 260 lifts, oil fund closes 2025 at US$3.25B.” January 26, 2026. newsroom.gy
2. OilNOW. “How Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund withdrawal rule works.” February 7, 2026. oilnow.gy
3. ExxonMobil. “Daily oil production hits 900,000 barrels in Guyana’s Stabroek Block.” November 12, 2025. corporate.exxonmobil.com
4. Council on Foreign Relations. “How Guyana’s Oil Boom Will Reshape Energy Security.” February 11, 2026. cfr.org
5. OilNOW. “Guyana secures title as world’s largest oil producer per capita.” November 21, 2025. oilnow.gy
6. UNICEF. “Child Food Poverty: Nutrition deprivation in early childhood.” June 6, 2024. data.unicef.org
7. UNICEF. “Guyana — Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS).” 2024. mics.unicef.org
8. Global Nutrition Report. “Country Nutrition Profiles: Guyana.” 2024. globalnutritionreport.org
9. Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). “UN report: Latin America and the Caribbean advances in eradicating hunger.” February 27, 2026. paho.org
10. World Bank. “Guyana — Poverty and Inequality Platform.” 2022 Estimate. pip.worldbank.org
11. International Monetary Fund (IMF). “World Economic Outlook — Real GDP growth.” April 2026. imf.org
12. International Rescue Committee (IRC). “Cost efficiency: malnutrition treatment.” September 9, 2016. rescue.org
13. 592Hub. “Guyana NRF Tracker — Live Oil Revenue Dashboard.” April 2026. 592hub.com

---

Supported By

We are grateful for the partnership and support of individuals and organizations committed to advancing Guyanese and Caribbean development and human capital investment.

Individual Supporters
Courtney Allen | All Te Networks | Corine Locke | Tony Harris | Roderick Alsopp | Dr. Michelle Luard | Clarence Bone

🇬🇾 Please support the Guyana Business Journal & Magazine today