In the early 1970s Guyana Prime Minister Forbes Burnham gradually pulled back on his support for Guyana’s cooperative socialist development program. With this political change came the decline of the Brooklyn based East cooperative farm in Guyana. By 1974, the Burnham regime increased its pursuit, in the word of Historian Russell Rickford, for cronyism and state capitalism that undermined the country’s economic and political stability. Shortly thereafter hunger and unemployment for lower caste citizens in Guyana increased. Burnham turned the nation into a dictatorship rocked with election shenanigans and political repression that sent foreign nationals like the members of the East quickly departing for Brooklyn still convinced that cooperative economics provided a roadmap for meeting the needs of lower cast people in Central Brooklyn.