148. The President of Guyana: The Fastest Growing Economy in the World (Irfaan Ali)
The Rest Is Politics: Leading
Goalhanger
4.6 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, |
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| 0:09.4 | Just go to therestispolities.com. That's therestispolitics.com. |
| 0:17.7 | Welcome to the Restis Politics leading, and I'm absolutely delighted, sadly not with Rory, |
| 0:25.2 | but with Iifan Ali, who is the president of Guyana. In recent years, the country with the fastest growing |
| 0:32.8 | economy in the world, thanks in large part to recent discoveries of oil. |
| 0:38.8 | 2020, growth 43.5%. |
| 0:42.0 | 2021, 20.1%. |
| 0:44.0 | 2022, 62.3.3.33.37.2. So a country that in 2015 was the second poorest in the entire hemisphere, second after Haiti, |
| 0:57.3 | now on track to have the highest GDP per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2030. |
| 1:03.0 | So that's quite a story. |
| 1:04.0 | As to where it is, let me tell you, Guyana is up at the top end of Latin America. |
| 1:08.9 | It's bordered to the west by Venezuela, which has its own claims, hotly disputed on large parts of Guiana. |
| 1:16.7 | It's got a very close ally to the south. |
| 1:18.4 | That's Brazil and Suriname to the east. |
| 1:20.9 | But Guiana is proudly part of the Anglophone Caribbean. |
| 1:24.9 | English is the main language. |
| 1:26.2 | That's a legacy in part of colonial days, |
| 1:29.1 | which ended in 1966. And I'm pleased to say that cricket is the national sport. |
| 1:34.6 | There's another very big part to the story that we're going to talk about, and that is what's |
| 1:38.3 | worth protecting, because Guyan is 85% rainforest. And this is a country not much smaller than the UK but with a population of |
| 1:48.1 | 800,000 1 million guineas approximately living abroad and if we the UK had similar forest cover |
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