Editorial

The Doha talks have ended, not unexpectedly without a successful conclusion.

Citizens of Canada, the UK or the USA who plan to pay a visit to Guyana soon can do themselves a favour by reading the travel advisories posted by the Georgetown diplomatic missions of their countries of origin.

A recent visit by a Stabroek News reporter to Arau near to the border with Venezuela presented a disturbing picture of the mining damage that is being done in this isolated community mainly inhabited by Amerinidians.

Last week there was no shortage of bad news about infrastructure.

Come September 2, representatives of donors and the developing countries they assist – governments as well as civil society – will meet in Accra, Ghana, to review decisions made in Paris, France in 2005 on the way aid should be delivered and managed.

The minds of many in the region are being exercised by the growing economic importance of Petrocaribe and the apparent appeal of President Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA).

After seven years of analysis and fine-tuning, nine quarrelsome days was all it took for the main actors at the World Trade Organisation’s Doha talks to realise that they couldn’t, after all, make a deal.

Simultaneously with the European Union’s effort to reorganize its economic relationships with the African, Caribbean and Pacific states, the EU is involved in a major effort of seeking to effectively influence the reorganization of the contours of the global economy taking place in the Doha Development Round talks.

Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee seems to have reached a fork in the road.

As we all know tomorrow’s seminar by the Privatisation Unit was summoned at the behest of President Jagdeo to educate business leaders and others on the tax laws as they relate to concessions.

The anglophone Caribbean nations are finally doing what the late Trinidadian Prime Minister Eric Williams foresaw all those decades ago: they are making themselves client states of Venezuela.

Current world trends indicate that, at least in the short to medium term, unemployment levels will continue to rise.

In his most recent ‘The view from Europe,’ David Jessop, one of the more astute external observers of regional affairs, pulls no punches in stating the growing view that a “dysfunctional regional integration process” now prevails in Caricom.

A few days ago Stabroek Business interviewed the Country Representative of the Inter-American Insti-tute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) Ignatius Jean about the work of IICA in Guyana and about the role of the organization in supporting the current regional response to the global food crisis.

The International Criminal Court’s decision to pursue the indictment of President Omar Bashir – a serving head-of-state – for war crimes in Sudan’s brutal civil war has been widely criticised by diplomats and political analysts who fear that the threat of prosecution could derail the country’s fragile peace process.

The European Union and the chief manager of the World Trade Organisation, Mr Pascal Lamy have sought, as one of the measures to facilitate a smooth passage of the Mini-Ministerial talks prior to the larger Doha gathering, to make a further concession to the Latin American banana producers in their case against the EU-ACP agreement on access to the EU market.

Again, last week, Minister of Home Affairs, Mr Clement Rohee was obliged to meet executives of the mining community to explain why recommendations of previous joint meetings remained unimplemented.

It has become increasingly clear that one of this government’s favourite methods of addressing controversies is to pretend as if it is doing something about them and to hope that public interest dies away.

One can only marvel at the government’s predilection for adding to its problems with seeming abandon.

The government on Thursday tabled in Parliament a number of amendment Bills, one of which, once passed into law, would allow the police to “supervise” persons convicted of sex crimes and kidnapping.