The presence of President David Granger out and about last Sunday morning, taking a look at work being undertaken to unblock clogged drains in the city and to restore the once impressive Independence Arch in Brickdam served to send a signal of his interest in restoring a sense of physical order in the country’s capital and repairing our historic sites and monuments.
International tour operators visiting Guyana never fail to leave these shores without commenting on the underachievement of the country’s tourism sector.
After several years of attending events like GuyExpo, interacting with manufacturers, particularly in the agro-processing sector, monitoring the emergence of the Small Business Bureau and attending endless fora where small business issues are discussed, this newspaper has arrived at some unshakable conclusions.
Jamaica will host its Sixth Biennial Jamaican Diaspora Conference during the period June 13 to 18 2015 at the Montego Bay Convention Center.
At face value it may not sound like a great deal and, moreover, it is only one of a multitude of initiatives required to address the varied challenges facing the local craftspeople and artisans and their industries.
Whether President of the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) Clinton Williams would have made much headway during his presentation at last Friday’s Annual General Meeting in his quest to persuade his audience that the umbrella body had made meaningful strides in overseeing the development of the manufacturing sector under his watch is not something that can be determined from a distance.
More than a week into April – Occupational Safety and Health Month – little if anything has been heard from either the government or the private sector about plans to commemorate what, in Guyana’s particular circumstances is an occasion of considerable significance if only because of our own less than stellar record on the issue of workplace safety and health.
It has been two months since around 60 beneficiaries received grants totalling some $20 million under the Micro and Small Enterprises (MSE) Development and Building Alternative Livelihoods for Vulnerable Groups’ project.
In relatively recent years—at least as far as we know—a range of our food exports have been used as conduits for the movement of illicit drugs to export markets, a practice that has begun to negatively affect the country’s reputation as a legitimate exporter.
The keenness of women to embrace self-employment reflects itself at several levels of our society, from the preponderance of vendors in the various municipal markets, arcades and pavements in the city and its environs to the more established ‘high street’ and services entities in the beauty, entertainment and other sectors.
We take our role as a “business supplement” to mean, among other things, that we have a responsibility to report not only on substantive business issues but on related ones as well, that is, matters which we feel have a critical bearing on business and the economy.
This newspaper has been doing as much as any other section of the media to publicise the manufacturing sector, its challenges and such accomplishments as it has realized.
All sorts of stories have circulated about the practice of offering expired and counterfeit brands of food and drugs for sale on the local market.
There were some revealing stories to be told this week by persons, mostly women, involved in the marketing of Avon products here in Guyana following the announcement by the American company that it was closing its distribution operations in sixteen Caribbean countries, including Guyana.
Up to the time of the writing of this editorial neither the public nor the private sector had bothered to make a public comment on the fact that there were two workplace accidents on the two preceding Fridays; the first in the bauxite industry and the second in the rice sector.
A few weeks ago Natural Resources and Environment Minister Robert Persaud provided responses to questions put to him by this newspaper about conditions in the mining sector covering both the gold and bauxite industries and embracing such issues as the general state of health of the respective industries, safety and health, the environment and – in the particular case of the bauxite industry, industrial relations.
In this issue of the Stabroek Business we reported on a visit to Guyana earlier this week by Prism Communications, a Jamaican product promotion company.
This week’s announcement by Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh that fuel prices at GuyOil pumps would have been reduced by Wednesday could have come earlier, though the fact that it has come at all is a blessing for both ordinary consumers and for the business community as a whole.
The portents, even this early in the year, suggest that 2015 could be an even tougher year for the gold-mining industry than 2014.
The Stabroek Business has begun the year by drawing attention to two modest manufacturing entities that have set out to raise standards in a sector that has been performing sluggishly for several years.
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