With financial constraints having long retarded the development of a robust tourism industry, the advent of Guyana’s oil and gas sector has coincided with the official ‘talking up’ of tourism not just as a significant money-earner but, as well, as a vehicle through which to finally ‘show off’ Guyana to the rest of the world.
For much of 2024 the country’s Minister of Tourism, Oneidge-Walrond has been making various interventions seemingly seeking to send signals to Guyanese at home, those in the diaspora and potential overseas visitors that the country is in the process of promoting a multi-faceted tourism sector that places emphasis on the long-delayed global ‘showing off’ of the array of attractions that comprise the country’s overall tourism profile.
In the process, emphasis has been placed on extending that profile abroad through occasional ‘road shows’ that take officially organized events elsewhere, mostly to the United States. At home, the country’s state-promoted tourism profile has focused on drawing attention to the hinterland and what it has to offer even as attention focuses in creating an urban visitor arrival infrastructure in the form of hotels and places of entertainment.
On the whole, these initiatives and the significant increase in business delegations of one kind or another to Guyana, have elicited an increasing level of chatter among both locals and visitors regarding the potential for Guyana to hold its own in the region as a world class tourist destination.
Just over a week ago a Department of Information (DPI) media disclosure made public government’s intention to create a tourism policy a draft of which is reportedly in the pipeline. If it has not been uncommon, over the years, for government to blow hot and cold about the fashioning of a tourism policy for Guyana, this time around most of the elements – not least, financial resources – would appear to be in place for the undertaking of such an assignment.
The recent official disclosure on what the DPI described as “the Caribbean’s first agri-tourism industry”, a draft of which, along with a road map, was also ‘unveiled’ a few weeks ago after “extensive discussions” was reportedly handed to the Ministries of Tourism, Industry and Commerce and the Ministry of Agriculture, jointly, with expert inputs from the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).
Both Ministers Mustapha (Agriculture) and Walrond (Tourism, Industry and Commerce) reportedly attended a national stakeholder meeting at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, where they participated in discussions on the policy’s details outlined in the proposal. The creation of a tourism infrastructure that places emphasis of Agri-tourism challenges the country’s agriculture sector to create a framework that can reflect the bona fides of both Guyana and the rest of the region.
Setting aside the role which the facility is expected to play in enhancing regional tourism it will also be aimed at opening up development and employment opportunities for farmers, small businesses, and rural communities, according to the DPI report.
