One of the inevitable knock-on effects of the global attention that Guyana has secured, ‘overnight,’ as a result of it joining the ranks of oil producers, is the expectation that the country’s new-found high profile will be attended by upgraded standards across a wider swathe of pursuits, not least the quality of the goods and services that it offers outside of the oil and gas sector. The global petro attention from which Guyana now benefits, has wandered off into areas outside the oil and gas sector, essentially piggy-backing on the country’s now widely recognized petro status.
The point should be made that Guyana can anticipate no favours on a global market in which product standards are a critical criteria for market acceptance. In a world of increasingly intense consumer ‘pickiness’ all that Guyana’s global attention has done is to remind of the need for the country to raise its game. Here, there are risks involved in allowing the conventional, less than stringent quality standards that have traditionally persisted, since we would be doing so at the risk of losing out on what is an existing significant global demand for food. It is here that the state-run Guyana National Bureau of Standards (GNBS) comes in, its role being to apply a particular set of standards to ‘home made’ products in order to help those products secure the widest possible international market acceptance.