As this piece is being written local business support organizations are busy probing the local content opportunities that repose in what is now the significant movement of foreign companies to Guyana in support of the expanding range of services required in the execution of the country’s long-term oil and gas recovery programme. There can be no doubt that that local private sector community sees the local content ‘opening’ as a once in a lifetime opportunity and there is a sense in which the pursuit by local business houses of ‘openings’ has become a preoccupation and that a significant portion of the private sector’s agenda is focused in that direction.
Meanwhile, the conventional small business sector is still battling with its own demons including market acceptance at home for their locally manufactured products and wider market acceptance in the Caribbean and beyond. The current discourse about the protectionist policies of Trinidad and Tobago, for example, and the impact of those on market access for products from Guyana was brought somewhat into the limelight recently by the revelation that a team of local experts had engaged their Trinidadian opposite numbers on this issue, never mind the fact that the release issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after the engagement was decidedly vague on the way forward.
