The curtains came down on the first ever Guyana Trade and Investment Exhibition (GuyTIE) at the Marriott Hotel in Kingston on Saturday but the outcome of the event intended to provide some indication of the competitiveness of the goods and services being offered here will have to await an assessment that goes beyond the speculative outcomes being proffered at this stage.
The official expectation is that the joint public/private sector-sponsored event would have yielded much more than had been provided over the years by the annual GuyExpo event; that at least appeared to be the expectation of the organizers. And while there was a distinct air of business and bustle over the three days of product display and business-to-business meetings between the visiting buyers and the local business houses, the absence of a sustained flow of information regarding those exchanges that yielded firm agreements made it difficult to arrive at a reliable evaluation of the outcome.
What was evident based on the chatter that ensued among participants in the event over the period was that the more than sixty overseas public and private sector enterprises that came to Georgetown for GuyTIE were brought here, perhaps more out of the longer term business prospects that repose in the prospects of Guyana’s attainment of the status of an ‘oil economy’ than hopes of any immediate trading breakthrough. Indeed, up to the middle of this week the Ministry of Business, the state entity responsible for staging the GuyTIE event was offering little by way of assessment of the final outcome beyond the promise of an initial release in the course of the week and a subsequent fuller report once all the pieces had been pulled together.
