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Guyana Population Distribution and Settlement Patterns
Statistics indicate that Guyana is one of the most lightly
populated countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The
World Bank (see Glossary)
estimated that there were four people per
square kilometer in Guyana in 1988, far fewer than the average of
twenty people per square kilometer for all of Latin America.
However, more than 90 percent of Guyana's population lived along
the coast, on a strip constituting only 5 percent of the country's
total land area. A more useful figure is the population density per
square kilometer of agricultural land, which was estimated at
forty-six in 1988. In Latin America as a whole, the average
population density on agricultural land was fifty-five per square
kilometer.
More than 70 percent of Guyana's coastal population is rural,
living on plantations or in villages strung along the coastal road.
The villages range in size from several hundred to several thousand
inhabitants. The layout of the villages is dictated by the drainage
and irrigation systems of the plantations, both active and
abandoned. The villages are most heavily concentrated along the
estuary of the Demerara River and the eastern environs of
Georgetown, near the mouth of the Berbice River close to New
Amsterdam, and along the extreme east coast near the Courantyne
River (see
table 3, Appendix A).
The pattern of population distribution in Guyana is a product
of nineteenth-century economic development, which was based on the
cultivation of sugarcane
(see The Early British Colony and the Labor Problem
, ch. 1).
Because the swampy coast was fertile and
sugar production was geared to export, the large sugar estates
confined their operations to a narrow coastal strip. Most of the
villages had ethnically diverse populations, but usually one ethnic
group predominated. The urban population was predominantly African,
but it would be misleading to suggest that all Afro-Guyanese were
urban. Indeed, the majority of the Afro-Guyanese population was
rural. A far greater majority of Indo-Guyanese, however, lived
outside the cities. The interior of the country was left mainly to
the Amerindians. Even the later exploitation of timber, bauxite,
and manganese in the interior failed to effect any sizeable
migration.
Data as of January 1992
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