Sizable quantity
One of the things that we notice from trade data provided by the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the dominance of manufactured goods in total merchandise trade in generating income for exporting countries. Countries that export a sizable quantity of manufactured goods benefit from the hog’s share of export revenues, about two-thirds of the global income from trade. At the same time, countries that export agricultural products get the least out of global export revenues, an estimated 11 per cent. Exporters of primary commodities like fuels and minerals do better than agricultural producing countries since they share 22 per cent of the global revenues. One must wonder what such knowledge means for a country like Guyana which has relied for its entire independent life on agricultural and primary commodities for its livelihood. While commodity exports produced benefits for Guyana, it also has been the source of much anxiety over the years.
Anxiety
The anxiety that Guyana faces in the trading arena does not come only from the type of commodities that it produces and sells abroad and the uncertainty in the prices that it gets for the products. Anxiety comes also from the very limited number of commodities that it exports in meaningful quantities. An analysis done over the 10-year period 2006 to 2015 revealed that eight products featured prominently in the export revenues of the country. These eight products are well known with six out of the eight consisting of agricultural or primary commodities. The main destinations of those products were Canada, USA, Caricom, UK and Venezuela. The Table below shows the distribution of the export revenues earned from the five countries.
