Business Editorial

GMSA and gov’t meeting on small business issues should be hastened

After he had made an undisguised ‘pitch’ on Thursday, August 3, at the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) Dinner and Awards Ceremony for the GMSA to engage government on the issue of the private sector body interfacing with the state-run Small Business Bureau (SBB), GMSA President, Ramsay Ali, had told the Stabroek Business that there had been an expectation that such a meeting was likely to have taken place “in two weeks’ time.”

CAW 23

It would be altogether fair to say that this year, Caribbean Agriculture Week (CAW) which is being staged in The Bahamas from October 9th – 13th, ought to be, for obvious reasons, one of the more important regional gatherings of any kind to have been staged in recent years.

Foreign policy and our material well-being

Arguably the most worthwhile takeaway from the recent visit by the President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) President, Kester Hutson, to India to attend the August 3-4 Ninth CII India-Latin America and the Caribbean Conclave under the theme ‘Furthering Economic Partnerships for Shared & Sustained Growth’ was the profusion of ideas which the visit yielded for the shape of Guyana’s economic diplomacy, going forward.

A pleasing development

It is not so much last Saturday’s signing of a ‘Declaration to foster social and economic development’ between the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) and the United Nations, as it is the actualization of the tenets of the Declaration that will help to provide a real assessment of the extent of the accomplishment of the Chamber-organized Small Business Week.

Georgetown

Georgetown is sinking ever deeper into a cesspool of filth, squalor and smelliness.

The Costa Rica food security consultations

Here we go again! Caribbean Ministers of Agriculture were due to gather in Costa Rica on Tuesday to discuss what the San Jose-based Inter American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) said are deliberations designed to discuss means through which food insecurity can be reduced and bridges built between Latin America and the Caribbean.

No excuse for absence of regular updates on Food Security Terminal

For all the measures put in place by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to roll back the tide of food insecurity following the United Nations World Food Programme’s (WFP) revelation late last year that 4.1 million people (or 57 percent of the region’s population) were facing food insecurity, concerns persist that the region is still some distance from being out of the woods on the issue.

Changing times

One of the things that the emergence of the oil and gas sector appears to have done for Guyana is to trigger an upgraded interest in entrepreneurship of one kind or another.

Oil and transformation

It will doubtless be recalled that the disclosure by ExxonMobil that the long-held belief that large deposits of oil lay within Guyana’s maritime jurisdiction was indeed true, created an unbridled furore here in Guyana.

Winning external markets for our agro produce

One of the stories appearing in this issue of the Stabroek Business has to do with the strides that Jamaica has made over the years in the agro-processing sector, particularly as it relates to the country’s marked success in having its products realise an impressive level of market acceptance in the United States and parts of Europe among other places.

We need a thorough briefing on Regional Food Security Terminal now!

Given what we were told just a matter of months ago was the perilous state in which some countries in the region found themselves, this newspaper has made the point regarding the need for there to be a periodic region-wide up-date on the pace of progress towards the operationalization of the Regional Food Terminal.

Agro-processing

Readers will encounter in this issue of the Stabroek Business (front page) an account of an informal but revealing exchange between us and a small group of local agro-processors whose experiments with transforming fruit and vegetables into condiments and food flavourings began, mostly, in less than well-appointed kitchens, equipped with no more than ‘the bare necessities’.

Regional Food Security Desk

The most recent attempt by the Caribbean to establish its food security credentials in a wider international community, where hunger and all its attendant consequences have become a serious concern would appear to have fallen, primarily to Guyana and Barbados, the former having been assigned much of the responsibility for substantive food production and the latter, for the creation of the physical infrastructure associated with the creation of the facility.

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