Private sector forum talks must be taken to ‘different level’ – Chintamani
President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) Chandradat Chintamani has told Stabroek Business that the private sector forum that formed part of the recently concluded Fifth Summit of the Americas in Port-of-Spain can lay the foundation for enhanced United States private sector investment in the region if the interaction that took place at the summit is taken beyond mere discourse.
In an exclusive review of the deliberations and outcomes of the historic summit Chintamani told Stabroek Business that during his stay in Port-of-Spain he took the opportunity to engage a former US state department official who is now associated with the private sector on the possibilities for increased US private sector interest in Guyana. ‘There are opportunities that we both recognized and discussed and agriculture is one of those areas. Arising out of these discussions it seems to me that Guyana needs to take the first step by declaring that it has lands available and that it has an investment climate that will attract investors to the agricultural sector,” he said.
Asked whether he felt that enough had been done to support the initiative taken by President Bharrat Jagdeo last year to seek to promote Guyana’s preparedness to embrace overseas investment in the country’s agricultural sector Chintamani said that he believed that much of the responsibility lay with the local private sector to create partnerships with potential foreign investors to exploit the opportunities in the agricultural sector.
And according to Chintamani the level of interest among private sector officials from the hemisphere as a whole in “food security” offers Guyana a unique opportunity to maximize its agricultural potential to the country’s considerable economic benefit.
Regional private sector officials are to meet in Jamaica in June to discuss issues arising out of their Port-of-Spain deliberations and Chintamani said that it is critical that Guyana be represented at that forum. “What the Jamaica meeting represents is an opportunity for us to close that gap that exists among the private sectors in the region. I do not think that as a regional private sector we recognize the role that we have to play in the development of the Caribbean,” Chintamani said.
Chintamani told Stabroek Business that he believed that there was “a lot more work to be done” to create a more cohesive regional private sector. He said that part of the focus of the forthcoming meeting in Jamaica would be on bridging the gap that currently exists among the various regional private sector bodies. “Once that gap has been bridged we would have provided a lot more opportunity for ourselves in the region,” he added. Chintamani disclosed that regional private sector officials will also be using their deliberations in Jamaica to arrive at practical ways of collectively responding to the impact which the global economic crisis has had on the economies of the Caribbean. He said that the Jamaica meeting will also provide an opportunity for regional private sector officials to seek to take forward the process which they began in Port-of-Spain,
Meanwhile Chintamani said that one of the areas of discussion between himself and regional private sector officials in Port-of-Spain centred on the need for the regional private sector to take bold initiatives rather than to wait on governments to lead the way. “One of the issues raised in Port-of-Spain was the need for us in the private sector to examine ways in which we can have comparative advantage in the various communities. Here in Guyana, for example, we can begin to engage the region in discussions regarding supplying the various supermarket chains and other regional outlets with fruit and vegetables. These are things that we can do on our own,” Chintamani said.
Asked to give his personal assessment of the outcome of the Summit Chintamani said that it was disappointing that all of the leaders who attended the Summit did not sign the Port-of-Spain Declaration. With regard to the private sector deliberations he said that he would have preferred Caribbean private sector officials to have met prior to the summit to fashion a common regional agenda for the summit forum. He said that had there been a prior meeting of Caribbean private sector officials “we would have been able to arrive at a common set of issues to put to Heads of Government.”
The GCCI President who was Guyana’s lone private sector representative at the Summit told Stabroek Business that the Port-of-Spain deliberations cited human prosperity, bio-diversity and energy conservation as issues that were high on the regional development agenda. “Those are issues that we all thought were important to the region if it is to move forward,” he added.
And according to the GCCI President the issue of the role of agriculture in satisfying the need for food sufficiency stood out on the private sector agenda. In Port-of-Spain, he said that the evident concern of the hemisphere as a whole with satisfying its food demands presents Guyana with ‘a huge economic opportunity.”
However, according to Chintamani the private sector discourses at the hemispheric summit must be “taken to a different level” if the forum is to mean anything to the people of the region. “It would have made no sense to address these issues in the first place if we are not prepared act on these issues,” he said.
Chintamani said that he believed that the Summit of the Americas may have “allowed the discussions to be weighted towards Cuba and Haiti” at the expense of other issues that are also important to the hemisphere. He said that while he was not seeking to downplay the importance of Cuba and Haiti, he believed that those issues could have been dealt with at a different level, “For me, one of the areas of disappointment is that we allowed some issues to distract our attention and the result of that was that we missed an important opportunity to come up with positions on a number of other issues that are important to the Caribbean and the hemisphere. For me, that was an area of failure for the summit, I believe that the presence of the President of the United States in Port-of-Spain ought to have been the catalyst for ensuring that the Declaration of Port-of-Spain was signed,” he added.
