Business Editorial

If there has been, in recent weeks, an editorial preoccupation on the part of the Stabroek Business pertaining to the hinterland, more particularly, coverage of some of the socio-economic currents in Region Nine, that is to say Lethem and some of its satellite communities, that is because the underdevelopment of the hinterland and the marginalisation of its communities continue to be serious fault lines in the country’s overall governance structure. 

Observers of what, up to this time, have been largely fruitless efforts to forge a regional food security pact that can, among other things, reduce expenditure on extra-regional food imports whilst upgrading the nutritional quality of the region’s food intake, may well be wondering whether the contribution made by President Irfaan Ali at the recent Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturers’ Association (TTMA) President’s Dinner and Award Ceremony will do anything to advance the process of regional food security or whether it will simply join the plethora of high-sounding pronouncements that have been made on the issue over the years.

The Stabroek Business’ recent visit to Lethem and parts of what is known as the ‘deep south’ in order to secure an update on ‘how the other half lives’ allowed our reporter to run into Rebecca Rodrigues-Faria, the Chairperson of the Rupununi Livestock & Producers Association.

On the issue of sustained advocacy for the creation of a convivial environment in which the country’s micro and small businesses can grow and prosper, the Stabroek Business readily admits to having been something of a ‘stuck record’ in its editorial ’offerings.

A rather snazzy-looking Guyana Police Force photograph evidently intended to make a point about the ‘ramped up’ state of the Force’s readiness for what, customarily, is a rash of seasonal crime, mostly robberies, appeared on the front page of the Stabroek News on Tuesday of this week.

The garbage-disposal regimen for Georgetown and its environs is, it seems, divided between the disposal services afforded by the Georgetown Municipality, on the one hand and private operators, on the other.

As is customarily the case with commemorative events that have a bearing on the consolidation of a sound, national, entrepreneurial culture, Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) 2021, which is being observed from Monday, November 8 to Sunday November 14, has not, up to this time, been attended by a programme of events, or initiative, planned by either government or the private sector.

With the sudden and globally devastating advent of the COVID-19 pandemic having cruelly exposed the weaknesses of the health sector in developing countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) Council on the Economics of Health for All is advocating with a renewed sense of urgency that clear and ambitious goals be set for mobilising investments towards financing for health as a long-term investment rather than a short-term cost.

There are unmistakable signs that the People’s Progressive Party/Civic administration has decided to throw a considerable measure of its ministerial weight behind what one might call its ‘economic diplomacy’ initiative that targets, simultaneously, a Guyanese diaspora that has evinced a fair measure of curiosity about such prospects as might arise from the developmental possibilities that inhere in the country’s status as a repository of world class oil & gas resources and on the other hand, the interests of expatriate foreign investors.

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record we consider it necessary to point out what we believe to be the enduring tendency on the part of the Ministry of Agriculture to often ‘talk up’ the responsibilities of its portfolio without paying due attention to the actualisation of its undertakings, that is to say, seemingly being oblivious to the fact that – as we say in Guyana, ‘the noise in the market is not the sale’.

Since his accession to the executive directorship of the Caribbean Export Development Agency (Caribbean Export), Deodat Mahraj, a former Deputy Secretary General of the Commonwealth, has been affording readers in the region exposure to some interesting ‘takes” on issues that have to do with Caribbean Development.

In circumstances where Guyana’s long-term economic prosperity is, these days, increasingly seen as anchored to the country’s emerging oil & gas industry, it was somewhat reassuring to hear the President’s recent comment at Ebini that “agriculture, food security and our ability to service the regional market is our future” to which he added that “all of our efforts will be to ensure we transfer enough resources to this sector to make it viable and resilient.”

Since the revelations beginning with those made by the Ethiopian-born biologist Dr.

We will have to wait and see just how the promise articulated in a CARICOM Secretariat  statement earlier this week that Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) from September 4th- 8th, 2021 will be a “unique, game-changing event” will ‘pan out.’

Guyana’s Amerindian communities will be hoping that President Irfaan Ali’s undertaking that the country’s ‘first people’ and their largely forest-based communities will benefit equally from the returns from the country’s oil and gas industry goes beyond the repetitive political promises, to actually improve the quality of their lives, which, half a century and a bit more after political independence, have gone, overwhelmingly, unfulfilled.

For now at least, we must accept as made public, information provided by Chief Executive Officer of the Guyana Office for Investment (G-Invest) Dr Peter Ramsaroop and reported by the Department of Public Information (DPI) not just that “the government has held talks with members of the diaspora in Texas and Florida, USA on the roles they could play in Guyana’s development” but also that “many overseas-based Guyanese have expressed a desire to return home.”

At a forum associated with the recent visit to Guyana by President Santokhi of Suriname, both Minister in the Office of the President Dr Ashni  Singh, and Suriname’s Foreign Minister, Albert Ramdin, reportedly expressed the view that, over time, Guyana and Suriname had failed to make good, the advantage of proximity to raise the profile of their bilateral relations in fields that include cross-country investment and other forms of business and economic cooperation.

The national jollification associated with the public disclosure of our May 2015 ‘first oil’ and the several others that have followed had dragged on for some time though there are indications that it is beginning to occur to us that ‘all that glitters is not gold’ and that after the confirmed oil discoveries and the commencement of oil recovery and sales there are some challenging, even unpalatable realities that we ignore at our peril.

There is some measure of public concern over how our oil resources are being managed.

Even as the respective countries in the Caribbean continue to take their own separate tilts at bemoaning what they regard as the distressing state in which much of the region’s agricultural sector finds itself, there still appears to be no discernable region-wide move to respond to what is regarded as a looming crisis.