Not for the first time in recent years, a head of the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-INVEST), Guyana’s state agency responsible for facilitating potential investors from overseas seeking to learn more about the procedures associated with investing in Guyana, has been sending deliberate signals about the agency’s preparedness to facilitate such inquiries.
Last week, the recently appointed Chief Executive Officer of GO-INVEST, Peter Ramsaroop, sent the latest signal that Guyana is ‘open for business’, this time, making public the country’s preparedness to operationalise existing trade agreements with the United Kingdom.
There are prospects here, taking into account pre-existing trade agreements between the two countries. Much of the greater interest, however, from Guyana’s standpoint, is likely to centre on the flurry of investor probes associated with the widely anticipated oil and gas-related flurry of overseas investments in the period ahead.
Dr. Peter Ramsaroop
Last week, however, Ramsaroop, during the course of a media briefing spent time on Guyana-UK bilateral trade relations arising out of what is believed to be an increase in demand for Guyanese wood and sugar. During the engagement with the media, Ramsaroop is reported to have alluded to work already underway at the level of GO-INVEST’s Export Unit to examine the possibility of maximising such advantage as might inhere, in what reportedly, is the increased UK demand for Guyanese products.
Prior to his engagement with the media in Georgetown, Ramsaroop met with the United Kingdom’s Commonwealth Caribbean Trade Envoy Darren Harry where he purportedly indicated Guyana’s readiness to enter into investment arrangements in a broad swathe of areas including agriculture tourism, and technology.
While Ramsaroop is reported to have said that Guyana possesses “the best investment climate” potential, investors will not be unmindful of the country’s track record for the frustrating ‘red tape’ that impedes the expediting of investment inquiries. Some potential investors have reported that there have been instances, over time, in which the dead hand of politics has not been far away from investment inquiries and that long and frustrating delays in securing responses to what can be considered to be fundamental investment inquiries are commonplace.
Ramsaroop, however, has been, according to a regional media report, pointing to an investment climate “with 40-plus per cent growth for 2020, a significant growth in 2021 with a President who believes in “democracy” as well as “a plan and a vision… that will create results” as credentials for generating significantly enhanced investor interest in Guyana.
That said, the need to build capacity within GO-INVEST has become a far more urgent priority recently, given the fact that the country’s oil and gas sector is now well and truly up and running (never mind the fact that earnings accruing directly to the country’s economy are still decidedly modest up to this point) and that this continues to trigger a flurry of investment interest among countries as far away as the Middle East.
This much has been underscored recently by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation which has been making public what it says is the country’s increased focus on expanding its retinue of diplomatic missions abroad as part of a broader initiative to place greater emphasis on economic diplomacy as a facet of its overall diplomatic effort.
Up to this time, however, more than five years following the announcement of the country’s first major oil find by ExxonMobil, there has still been no real attempt to secure the skills sets that can better position either GO-INVEST or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation to execute the particular roles that government envisages for them. With regard to GO-INVEST, particularly, which, in the period ahead may well find itself confronting a broad swathe of investment-related inquiries, moves to recruit more of the skills necessary for the effective execution of what is likely to be a far more weighty agenda, going forward, cannot come too soon.
