By Dr. Lystra Fletcher-Paul
As the Covid-19 pandemic rapidly unfolds around the world and particularly the Caribbean, people are now awakening to the new reality of the far-reaching impacts that this pandemic will have on their lives in the future.
Already having dealt a devastating blow to the tourism and service sectors across the region, adversely impacting the mainly small and open economies, the impact of the coronavirus has left the countries of the Caribbean “staggering”, according to United Nations Resident Coordinator for Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, Didier Trebucq.
LONDON (Reuters) – OPEC and other major oil producers were due to discuss on Thursday big output cuts in the face of a huge fall in demand due to the coronavirus crisis.
It would, one expects, not have been lost on the leaders of this nation and on the nation as a whole that the absence of an officially declared outcome to the March 2 general elections up to this time and the onset of the coronavirus are the two priority concerns and that the well-being of the country in all of its various respects is dependent on the satisfactory handling and the outcomes of both issues.
Gold Prices for the three day period ending Thursday April 09, 2020
Kitco is a Canadian company that buys and sells precious metals such as gold, copper and silver.
A warning from the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) about the consumption of “wild meat” in the face of the global coronavirus pandemic outbreak could compel large numbers of Guyanese to set that particular preference aside at least for as long as the virus persists.
With the halt of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)-supported school meals programme for children in Latin America and the Carib-bean, the UN organisation wants regional governments to implement measures to support schoolchildren whose families “have greater difficulties in accessing food,” and ensure that children’s access to nutritious food is maintained, in the current conditions of emergency associated with the global coronavirus pandemic.
If high inventories of oil and continually declining prices are providing huge headaches for even the most powerful companies in the global oil & gas sector, these days, this applies doubly for Guyana’s western neighbour, Venezuela, believed to possess the single largest oil reserves in the world.
Business houses across the world, including here in Guyana, have been, seemingly with little if any public or official urging, throwing in their lot in support of what now, is a frantic global effort to roll back the tide of the coronavirus menace.
In what has become a full-blown ‘chess game’ between the US administration and the government of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, as Washington persists in its exertion of pressures in an effort to force the collapse of the ruling administration in Caracas, the Russian oil giant Rosneft PJSC has hastily sold its assets in Venezuela to the Russian government in order to evade US sanctions that continue to be imposed on external entities still doing business with the government in Caracas.
The post-election crisis in the country has negatively contributed to the business climate, the Guyana Manu-facturing and Services Association (GMSA) has said, as it called for a democratic and timely resolution to the present impasse.
*Prices only represent the average Wholesale Farmgate and Retail Prices at the above mentioned markets and are NOT prices set by the Guyana Marketing Corporation or Ministry of Agriculture.
GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 871’s trading results showed consideration of $7,698,040 from 36,714 shares traded in 12 transactions as compared to session 870’s trading results which showed consideration of $1,524,037 from 16,604 shares traded in 8 transactions.
Notwithstanding the fact that small and micro enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in the economic life of most countries, particularly in the instances of developing countries like Guyana, the history of the Business Support Organisations (BSO) in Guyana which includes the Private Sector Commission (PSC), has not, as a matter of policy, reflected in their pursuits, a commitment to providing sustained support for what we in Guyana deem to be small and micro enterprises.
The outbreak and subsequent spread of the Coronavirus has had a “devastating effect” on the global oil & gas industry and the likelihood that the effects could be felt in the current phase of Guyana’s fledgling oil & gas sector, which is proceeding under the control of the US super major, ExxonMobil, cannot, it seems, be ruled out.
There has always been a tendency, even in circumstances of presumed emergency, for Guyanese, on the whole, to strike a ‘business as usual posture,’ or else to trust what we customarily call ‘pot luck,’ that whatever danger may be ‘out there,’ we will, somehow, ‘dodge the bullet.’