Business Editorial

Agriculture Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy’s announcement last week about the introduction of draft Food Safety legislation in the National Assembly at its next sitting would have taken many people by surprise.

At various times over the past several months this newspaper has reported on the Micro and Small Enterprise (MSE) Development and Building Alternative Livelihood for Vulnerable Groups project which is being funded under the environmental partnership between Guyana and Norway and overseen jointly by the Inter-Ameri-can Development Bank and the Government of Guyana.

One of the many pieces missing from Guyana’s tourism jigsaw is how to go about creating a training regime that would allow us to offer an at least acceptable level of service to visitors.

It was heartening to hear from the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) earlier this week that a group of Canadian businessmen who had come to Guyana on a mission to check out the prospects of buying local farm produce and agro-processed foods, had expressed the view that what they saw in Guyana would probably meet the expectations of the Canadian market.

In theory at least, local consumer protection regulations frown on business houses that display ‘goods not returnable’ signs on their shop fronts or stamp such notices on their bills.

The proliferation of eating houses of one sort or another around the city has given rise to the need for appreciably heightened levels of vigilance as far as service providers’ attention to issues of safety and health and standards on the whole are concerned.

One of the weaknesses that Guyana will have to overcome if it is to stake a persuasive claim as a tourism destination is the absence of the high service standards which, these days, are increasingly demanded by international travellers.

For sheer evidence of agricultural bounty and food security in Guyana nothing beats the sight of our municipal markets on busy days with our housewives trading stories on street corners about how “good” the market is and when, to our considerable discredit, what cannot be traded or consumed is dumped on parapets or in canals close to the markets.

A succession of occurrences, incidents and accidents in the past year or so have placed the spotlight on the aviation sector, which, customarily, would appear to favour getting on with what it has to do in conditions of quiet diligence and placing itself in the public domain only when it becomes necessary to do so.

The current political administration, including President Donald Ramotar, has made some  definitive pronouncements regarding the country’s tourism potential and what is felt to be the contribution tourism can make to providing employment and growing the country’s economy.

In his 2014 budget presentation, Finance Minister Dr.Ashni Singh announced that this year growth in the manufacturing sector was projected  at 7.1 per cent, driven largely by what, in his words was an “anticipated recovery of the sugar industry.”

Today’s national agro-processing event being held at the International Conference Centre, Liliendaal is important for several reasons, perhaps the key one being that it provides a stage on which many small manufacturing enterprises – some, first the first time – can bring their products to the attention of a relatively large potential market.

Issues pertaining to the state of the country’s rice sector and particularly the export sector have arisen in the media over the past few weeks.

The annual Attitudinal Survey which the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce has undertaken for three consecutive years has its limitations, one of which is that it proffers the opinions of considerably less than a majority of the business houses in Georgetown and its environs.

Evidence of the emergence of an increasing number of micro and small business initiatives in recent years has raised questions about the longer-term future of the small business sector as a whole.

At this very moment we are living in one of those now familiar cycles of violence that targets the business community; violence that is sudden and frightening and which leaves even those of us who are not its actual victims chastened.

One of the more forgettable memories of our annual Mashramani celebrations is the utterly deplorable state in which the streets, walkways, and canals are left once the revellers have come and gone.

Part of the problem, which we continue to highlight, in bringing deficiencies in areas of public sector service delivery into the public domain and seeking to have those deficiencies corrected, has to do with the disinclination of public officials to ‘come clean’ on issues that are officially deemed to be sensitive.

This newspaper’s coverage of business issues over the past year or so has included extensive chronicling of the role that municipal markets play in the broader national commercial culture.

Time and again in recent years the point has been made publicly that the significant increase in the construction of large buildings in various parts of the country ought to be more than sufficient cause for us to shine a more prominent spotlight on the issue of safety and health in the building sector.