President Donald Ramotar yesterday retreated from his previous position that a 20% drop in gold declarations up to May was because of hoarding by miners.
“Did I ever say there is hoarding of gold?” he questioned when asked about the matter during a news conference at State House yesterday. “I [don’t] remember saying that, what I was saying that… there was a fall in declarations but at that time I didn’t see, maybe implicit in what I said…” the President offered, even as reporters indicated to him that he had indeed blamed hoarding for the drop in declarations.
“As far as I see… probably the price is having an impact on these things and probably there’s delayed declarations,” he said smiling. “Probably there’s delayed declarations in some instance,” he said.
“There has been a drastic reduction in declaration which means that there seems to be a lot of hoarding taking place,” the President had said last month while hinting that the authorities could go after gold hoarders. The decline in declarations has worried the government as gold has been the major driver of the economy in recent years and is a key source of foreign exchange.
Meantime, on Friday, Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment Robert Persaud said that gold declaration is still down for the year so far – 16% up to this month. Persaud said that for the year so far declarations were at 233,305 ounces as compared to 278,127 ounces for the same period last year.
In terms of the reasons for the drop in declarations, Persaud said, “We have not accepted or unaccepted any factor because we are still working with the mining communities to determine some of the contributing factors.”
The minister also said it was too early to arrive at such a concrete conclusion that hoarding was the reason for the drop in declarations as analyses had not yet been completed. “At this point in time, I would say that we are doing some assessments to determine… There are a number of factors that have combined certainly together and it is our obligation and our intention to work with stakeholders to address whatever those factors are,” he said.
Further, he had said that government’s position that low declarations were the result of hoarding would have come from information supplied but did not say by whom.
The minister also announced a series of measures aimed at reversing the decline.
Industry insiders had rejected government’s position that miners are hoarding gold, saying instead that a drop in production is one of the major factors responsible for the 20% decline in gold declarations for the first five months of this year which had seen Guyana losing $20 billion in foreign exchange earnings. Many miners had said that they were struggling to stay afloat and some were forced to close their operations. “The average miner cannot afford to keep gold,” one official had said.
An official of the Guyana Gold and Diamond Miners Association (GGDMA) had stressed that the drop in price had affected miners significantly and stated that in the wake of the drop in gold prices the organisation has been lobbying government for concessions.
