No Capacity, No Rules

   No Capacity, No Rules

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar– September 2026

The Amerindian Peoples Association says Guyana never consulted them on uranium exploration at Kurupung. A former head of the EPA says the country couldn’t safely oversee it even if it had.

“Guyana has no capacity whatsoever to oversee any area of uranium mining and long term monitoring.” — Dr. Vincent Adams, former EPA Executive Director

Two letters, a week apart, made the same demand from different directions.

The first came from the Amerindian Peoples Association and Indigenous leaders in Region Seven, addressed directly to Environmental Protection Agency Executive Director Khemraj Parsram. It asked the EPA to rescind the Environmental Management Plan for U92 Energy Corp.’s Kurupung uranium project, if one has already been issued, and to suspend review of any related applications until the affected community has been properly engaged. “It is highly demeaning for our people to have to be obtaining all information and communication on this potentially dangerous project, from the media,” the letter states.

The second, effectively, came from Dr. Vincent Adams — a former Executive Director of that same EPA, and, before that, the United States’ representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency on precisely this class of problem. Asked directly whether Guyana has the capacity to oversee uranium mining and its long-term aftermath, his answer left no room for qualification: “Guyana has no capacity whatsoever to oversee any area of uranium mining and long term monitoring.”

Read together, the two documents are not two separate objections. They are one argument, made twice, from a community asking to be heard and an expert confirming that even if they are, the state behind the listening has nothing to hear it with.

WHAT THE COMMUNITY IS ASKING FOR

The APA’s letter is procedural in the most literal sense — it invokes the actual text of the law. Part IV of the Environmental Protection Act requires a developer to disclose a project’s “possible effects on the environment,” and where those effects are unclear, requires the EPA to publish its reasoning in a daily newspaper on whether a full Environmental Impact Assessment is needed, with an explicit right for any affected person to appeal that decision to the Environmental Assessment Board.

None of that happened, according to the letter. No newspaper notice. No opportunity to engage. No opportunity to appeal. The community says it learned of the project’s advance from an August 7, 2026 Kaieteur News article in which the developer said drilling would begin in August “following receipt of the EPA’s approval of the environmental management plan” — a claim the letter formally asks Parsram to confirm or deny, because as far as the signatories know, no such approval has been made public.

The letter also surfaces a detail that has not, to this publication’s knowledge, been previously reported: it states that 55 miles of radioactively contaminated core samples from historical exploration work have been sitting in storage for decades, with no communication to the community about their presence, their condition, or the exposure risk they may pose to children, pregnant women, animals, and the rivers, creeks and farmland the community depends on. This publication has not independently verified the extent or current custody of that material, and is continuing to investigate — but the claim itself, from Indigenous leaders formally petitioning the national environmental regulator, is a matter of public record as of this letter.

This is the same governance gap this publication documented in “No Consent, No Rules”: Kurupung’s 92.2 square kilometres are classified as state land, not titled Amerindian territory, so the Amerindian Act’s consent provisions never formally engage;  even though APA says the project sits on the ancestral territory of the Kapohn (Akawaio) and Pemon Peoples. What the EPA letter adds is that even the generic, non-Indigenous-specific safeguards written into the EPA Act — public notice, a chance to comment, a right to appeal — appear also not to have been followed.

The community was not excluded only from a consent standard tailored to Indigenous rights. It says it was excluded from the ordinary process owed to any Guyanese citizen.

WHAT THE EXPERT SAYS ABOUT WHETHER IT WOULD MATTER ANYWAY

Adams’s letter to EPA , and his answers to this publication’s questions, go further than procedure. His argument is that even a perfectly followed consultation process would sit on top of a regulatory system with no ability to actually manage what it is approving.

His authority to say so is not casual. Adams was selected by the IAEA to plan and chair its 2009 international conference on remediation of land contaminated by radioactive material — a gathering in Kazakhstan that drew over 300 professionals from more than 60 countries, alongside NATO, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the UN Development Programme. He was later responsible, in the United States, for characterizing and cleaning up uranium mining sites nationally, work that required standing up three separate federal programs — the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program, the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, and the Office of Legacy Management — to monitor engineered burial sites indefinitely. Guyana, he notes, was not among the countries the IAEA trained in the wake of that 2009 conference, “for obvious reasons”: it had no uranium industry to speak of at the time.

Asked what specifically is missing, Adams did not describe a country merely short of equipment. “Just having instruments whether properly calibrated or not doesn’t mean anything if you don’t understand what the instruments are telling you and how to respond,” he said. He was equally direct that the gap is not confined to government: U92 itself, he said, is a two-year-old company that “has also demonstrated no adequate knowledge nor experience in uranium operations” — leaving Guyana, in his assessment, in a position comparable to its relationship with ExxonMobil, dependent on the operator’s own representations about the very risks it is being asked to regulate.

Confirmed by this publication in earlier reporting: the performance bond currently held by the state against the Kurupung project is US$104,542. Adams said he was not previously aware of that figure, but called it “ludicrous” regardless of whether it is meant to cover exploration or eventual production. His reasoning centers on what happens if something goes wrong: unlike ExxonMobil, he said, U92 has no assets of scale to draw against in a major incident, which means the operative question is not what bond is adequate but who absorbs the cost if the company cannot. “Who covers the cost if a disaster occurs and they declare bankruptcy and walk away,” he asked, “leaving the Amerindian community with their livelihood that has been destroyed?”

Adams also confirmed, on the record, that no uranium or radioactive-minerals application of any kind reached the EPA during his own tenure as its Executive Director. Kurupung is not simply an under-resourced case. It is the first case of its kind the agency has ever had to handle

TWO DEMANDS, ONE ANSWER OWED

The APA has asked the EPA to rescind the environmental management plan and pause every related review until the community is properly consulted. Adams has asked, separately, that his own expertise be brought to bear on a project he says the government currently has no internal capacity to evaluate on its own terms.

Neither demand requires the other to be resolved first. A community’s right to be consulted before a uranium project advances on its ancestral land does not depend on whether the state is technically competent to regulate that project — and a regulator’s technical incompetence does not excuse it from the consultation the law already requires. But together, the two letters describe a project moving forward on a double absence: no meaningful engagement with the people whose land and water are at stake, and, by the account of the one Guyanese official who has actually chaired an international body on this exact hazard, no capacity to catch what that absence of engagement might miss.

The EPA has not yet responded publicly to either letter. This publication has asked Executive Director Parsram to confirm whether the Kurupung environmental management plan has been approved, and will update this report with any response received.

— The Board