Business

There is a virtually unshakable consensus amongst residents in the capital that the state of our municipal markets is an acute embarrassment to our capital and that officialdom, at the levels of the municipality, central government and the private sector evince no real sense of concern over this state of affairs.

President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) Lance Hinds has called for the adoption of legislation that takes greater account of the direction in which the Guyana economy is heading.

At the conclusion of last weekend’s Government Technical Institute (GTI) graduation exercise the institution’s Principal Carl Benn struck an optimistic and upbeat note about its future.

On Friday August 22, 2008, this newspaper published a report based on a disclosure made by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) to the effect that it would be taking a tough line against business houses known or believed to be involved in the pedalling of illicit drugs and the marketing of counterfeit goods.

Winning this year’s Scotiabank Business Plan Competition is just the kind of public relations push that Lester Woolward and Samantha Austin need to help promote C-Post, an emerging enterprise that seeks to infuse a greater measure of efficiency into the delivery of packages across Guyana.

Against the backdrop of periodic differences amongst Caribbean Community (Caricom) countries over access to intra-regional markets, Caricom Secretary General Irwin LaRocque has restated what he said is the regional movement’s commitment to a Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME) as a tool for the collective growth of the region’s economies.

Fashion designer Carol Fraser has returned home from the recently concluded Guyana Trade, Tourism and Investment Expo 2014, in the United States chastened by the experience and altogether persuaded that marketing Guyana and what it has to offer to the outside world remains a work in progress.

Keen to further burnish its image as an ardent supporter of the small business community Scotiabank, on November 26, announced the winner of its business plan competition, which was launched in collaboration with the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) in September, as one of the bank’s Small Business Week initiatives for 2014.

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 592’s trading results showed consideration of $4,493,917 from 22,430 shares traded in 9 transactions as compared to session 591’s trading results, which showed consideration of $20,459,565 from 440,091 shares traded in 24 transactions.

This past week and despite better weather some of the key business areas of the city have been, at best coping with the aftermath of the flooding.

While Caribbean beneficiaries of Venezuela’s estimated US$8 billion PetroCaribe oil subsidy remain largely quiet on their energy options in the event that the continually falling oil price compels the Bolivarian Republic to call a halt to the arrangement, international opinion suggest that it is a question of when rather than if the Maduro administration turns off the tap on the deal.

On Monday, in the middle of the afternoon, the vendors trading in the Water Street Arcade were mostly sitting around outside their stalls, talking with one another, all the while, alert to the possibility of an isolated ‘sale.’

One of the issues that have arisen in relation to the highly touted US$5 million Micro and Small Enterprise and Building Alternative Livelihoods for Vulnerable Groups (MSE) project, funded by the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF), is what would appear to be the slow pace of the processing and disbursement of grants to beneficiaries.

Even at the best of times, that is to say during periods when there is no excessive rainfall and no flooding, the status of Bourda Market (and other municipal markets) as a facility in which the business of conducting trade in items of food, including perishables, is highly questionable.

In the years since the issue of the trade in counterfeit goods has been on the radar of the local Food and Drugs Analyst Department, we have not been able to learn nearly as much as we ought to about the scale of the problem, the dangers that it poses and the extent to which its proliferation hurts both the manufacturers and the distributors of genuine brands.

A significant and seemingly sustained increase in demand for dried coconuts was the major feature of exports of Guyana’s non-traditional commodities during 2013, according to information provided to this newspaper by the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC).

Employees of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) may just have returned to work with a meagre 8 per cent salary increase following a period of industrial action, but according to information reaching this newspaper sustained high gold prices over several years had seen the entity raking in healthy sums of money.

Occupational Safety and Health Consultant Dale Beresford has told Stabroek Business that the sanitization exercise carried out at Bourda Market ought to have been replicated at other municipal markets affected by last week’s flooding.