Dear Editor,
Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo is quoted in the press as saying that under his watch the PPP will return to power. Editor, it is with an interrogating mind I ask ‒ to do what? Under his watch he boasts of nine consecutive years of economic growth, but let us properly analyze this situation. Over those nine years the growth rate averaged at 4.3 per cent. But Editor, Mr Jagdeo failed to tell us the whole truth. He did not tell us that the average transfer of wealth from the European Union because of preferential sugar prices averaged 5 per cent for most of those years. Then when the preferential prices for sugar ceased at the end of 2012, they were replaced by preferential rice prices in 2013 and 2014 from Venezuela at almost 55 per cent more than the world market prices with aggregated wealth transfer from Venezuela in 2013 and 2014 valued at over US$105 million. This is what Venezuela paid in excess of the world market prices for Guyana’s rice in those two years.
Let us do the arithmetic since this seems not be his forte. If we were to take away the additional revenue from the preferential EU sugar prices and the preferential rice prices offered by Venezuela in 2013 and 2014, the economy would have actually regressed. So any financial analyst worth their salt should not be surprised that the economy is “flatlining” in 2015 since it is finally on stage in the real world with our products being sold at world market prices. No artificial props! For the first time since 1978, we have to compete in the world market without some kind of free transfer of cash from our trading partners, and we are found very wanting.
This has nothing to do with the APNU+AFC coalition; they were dealt a very bad hand by the Ramotar administration. What is done with this bad hand is what matters now.
Yours faithfully,
Sase Singh
