Business Editorial

There used to be a time when kitchen gardens were commonplace in the Caribbean.

Beginning last Tuesday the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in collaboration with the governments of the Netherlands and Japan and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) commenced a four-day training exercise targeting commercial banks in the region and aimed at equipping the banks to make more informed judgements on the matter of lending to small businesses.

Recently the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published a report which dealt with, among other things, some of the challenges faced by the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in attracting foreign investment.

Gold is a remarkable metal. Over time, it has sustained its importance as a store of value, its price at any given point in time being determined by factors such as inflation, interest rate volatility, fluctuations in the value of the dollar, currency-related crises and international political tensions that threaten to have economic implications.

For much of this year the Guyana Manufacturers and Services Association (GMSA) has sought to maintain a high profile and this newspaper has been engaging the association at the level of its President, Mr Clinton Williams, in an effort to secure information on its activities.

Not a few owners and Chief Executive Officers of business houses in Guyana have complained from time to time about the challenges which they face in running their enterprises respectively in the face of a scarcity of skills, particularly though not exclusively at the senior management level. 

While we have no wish to question the sincerity of the recent statement by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce (GCCI) on the issue of compliance, or more accurately, widespread lack of compliance with fire regulations by large sections of the urban commercial community, it has to be said that the various private sector bodies have been paying little more than lip service to an issue that has been with us at least for several decades and one which, periodically, manifests itself in disasters that leave ugly scars on the urban commercial landscape and devastate what in some cases are decidedly under-insured business houses.

Every so often we are treated to political pronouncements the particular titles of which vary from one presenter to another but all of which address one or another aspect of hinterland development.

This column has already commented on the virtues of the initiative spearheaded by former Jamaican prime minister and Caricom elder statesman Percival J Patterson to put together a US$1billion fund to help regional service providers participate in the physical recon-struction of earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

The Monday, February 21 issue of the Barbados Business Authority, one of the more informative business newspapers in the region, contains an article titled “Attractive Environment For Investment” authored by Michael Austin, the Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados-based offices of Illuminat, a Neal and Massy subsidiary with interests elsewhere in the region that provides information technology and communications products, services and solutions that help to manage, develop and troubleshoot businesses.

Passengers

In a recent interview with this newspaper, President of the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association (GMSA) Clinton Williams expressed the view that some of the sub-sectors in the local private sector were not being sufficiently aggressive in seeking markets for their goods and services beyond the shores of Guyana.

We do not know enough to pronounce with  any authority on the claims made earlier this week by laid off workers at the NPIC Call Centre regarding their conditions of work, though some of those claims bear a striking resemblance to complaints made by employees of call centres in other parts of the world.

Since the formal opening of the Takutu Bridge in September 2009 by President Bharrat Jagdeo and then Brazilian President Luis Ignacio Lula Da Silva, there has been a significant intensification of public discourse regarding the prospects of stronger trade and economic ties between Guyana and Brazil.

The recent upheaval arising out of the displacement of several vendors from outside the Stabroek Market following the grenade explosion early last month raises once again the issue of how to treat seriously with urban street vending.

A businessman with whom this newspaper talked earlier this week spoke eloquently for the numerous ‘bottom-house’ manufacturers who have survived and even grown over the years without succeeding in realizing the level of expansion that would set them on a path to real entrepreneurship.

The Private Sector Commission (PSC), in what it described as its “initial scoping of the budget impact” issued a press release on Tuesday headlined ‘PSC congratulates Minister of Finance, Government of Guyana on tax reforms’.

The chaos that has, for years, passed for vending in the vicinity of the Stabroek Market could not have been allowed to go on forever; pity indeed that it took an incident involving loss of life and multiple injuries to get the authorities to do something to address the problem.

It comes as no surprise that Guyana’s gold industry outdid itself once again this year, topping 300,000 ounces for the second consecutive year and earning the country upward of US$346 million, reportedly, the best performance by the sector since the closure of Omai Gold Mines Ltd five years ago.

Cross border smuggling is nothing new to Guyana and given our open and ill-protected entry points, restricting the practice requires a level of resources which the Government of Guyana has never quite been able to afford and will probably not be able to afford for a long time.