Caution

Among the items of good news to emerge last week was the statement from Guyana National Energy Authority CEO Joseph O’Lall that Guyana would be buying only half its oil energy needs from Venezuela. He was reported in our Wednesday edition as telling this newspaper that this would amount to 5,200 barrels per day on concessionary terms under the PetroCaribe agreement, although Venezuela was willing to supply more than this. Sensibly, Guyana, it seems, was not prepared to put all its eggs in one basket.

Trinidad, from whom we have been buying oil ever since the PdVSA strike in Venezuela in 2002, had made it clear even before PetroCaribe was signed that she would not be stepping in to fill the breach for those countries which had switched to Venezuelan oil and who subsequently encountered difficulties in their supply. Energy contracts tended to be of a long-term nature, it was explained, and once Trinidad had found new markets she would not be in a position to make good any shortfall experienced by her former customers. Perhaps this was one of the reasons which persuaded the GNEA to operate with more caution than some of its Caribbean counterparts.

As it is, Trinidad, a Caricom member and the primary supplier of petroleum products to the Caribbean has now been displaced by Venezuela. It was all done with unseemly haste. While Caricom nations had been in discussions about the PetroCaribe deal prior to its signing, and they had come to some accord in principle, no final document had been laid in front of the members. According to the Venezuelan press, that only materialized shortly before the representatives of the countries being offered the concession actually turned up for the ceremony in Puerto de la Cruz. Prime Minister Patrick Manning was understandably hostile to the arrangement and did not sign, and neither did Barbados, which sent a relatively low level official to the meeting. The fact that the heads were prepared to go along with these somewhat irregular arrangements had the stamp of opportunism on it.

The exceptions noted above, no one, for example, seemed too concerned about the implications of PetroCaribe for economic integration of regional unity. And now it is President Ch