Business

With the emerging oil & gas industry opening up Guyana to a range of investment opportunities, NSB Omega Guyana Inc (NGI) is one of several emerging enterprises that continue to swell the ranks of the private sector.

Mitford Ward’s excursion into private enterprise had its roots in the realisation that the country’s high cost of living renders the returns from salaried employment altogether inadequate to meet one’s needs.

The Stabroek Business has already commented on the fact that the local Ministry of Agriculture is yet to make public such plans as it might have for participation in the United Nations-designated International Year of Fruits and Vegetables (IYFV) this year.

The Caribbean may not, after all, find itself excluded from the mix when key international organisations and heavy hitters in the global business community begin to seriously zero in on post-COVID recovery targeting developing countries, according to a Caribbean Business Report disclosure made earlier this week.

With the economically crucial tourism industries of most member countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) impacted to varying degrees by the coronavirus pandemic, the group is collectively engaged in fashioning a joint tourism policy that seeks to restore the fortunes of a sector without which the region could be confronted with a severe and protracted socio-economic crisis.

Shamed, perhaps, by last month’s feral blast by World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus over the unequal allocation of COVID-19 vaccinations among rich and poor countries, the leaders of the Group of Seven global economic powerhouses have undertaken to move to immunise the world’s neediest people against the rampaging COVID-19 pandemic by contributing both finances and vaccine doses to a United Nations-backed vaccine distribution effort aimed at redressing what is now accepted as an unacceptable imbalance in the global distribution of the vaccines.

By Clinton Urling During a recent consultative forum to discuss the draft of government’s Local Content Policy document, it came as no surprise that the issue of financing for the small business sector which, incidentally, comprises the bulk of the country’s private sector, surfaced as a topic for discussion.

                                             Kitco Market Data Gold Prices for the three day period ending Thursday February 25, 2021

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 903’s trading results showed consideration of $17,771,820 from 175,766 shares traded in 30 transactions as compared to session 902’s trading results which showed consideration of $26,152,703 from 283,622 shares traded in 39 transactions.

There being no clear indication up to this time as to just when there will be a measure of respite from the COVID-19 pandemic, the restraints that continue to harness the business sector grow increasingly worrisome.

The economic impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the indelible mark that it has left on tourism industry in the Caribbean is reportedly doing little to interfere with the prediction by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that the region will record some level of growth this year.

Refusing to surrender to the rampaging assault on their livelihoods by the ravages of COVID-19 the members of the Mocha Arcadia Multipurpose Agriculture Cooperative Society are set to stage their second Producers Market Day in two months on Sunday February 21, Chairman of the Society Raeburn Jones told Stabroek Business earlier this week.

Little Otter Candles, Jessica Alexander says, has emerged from her love for candles and home fragrances and out of many months of research into candle-making.

After being disappointed by Budget 2020 for its lack of direct support towards businesses, which have suffered tremendously from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collective private sector anticipated with hope that Budget 2021 would contain comparable fiscal measures like the billions granted to households and public sector employees last year.

Developing countries including territories in Latin America and the Caribbean are likely to find the pace of their post COVID-19 recovery significantly compromised notwithstanding the fact that during 2020, a full calendar year of the pandemic, they attracted a record share of global foreign direct investment, according to Investment Trends Monitor published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) at the end of January this year.

STEM Guyana, the organization which dramatically raised the country’s technology profile by fielding teams that distinguished themselves at prestigious international robotics competitions in Washington and the United Arab Emirates, earlier this week told the Stabroek Business that it is preparing to distribute nearly 1000 lessons plans to parents & vulnerable students across the country.

A pleasing afternoon in the company of one of the current key players in what is almost certainly the most enduring eating house in contemporary Guyana, Clinton Urling, was sufficient to send a message that the onset of COVID-19 has done little to dampen the entrepreneurial spirit of the second-generation owners of German’s Restaurant.

It may have come as a surprise to some of the representatives of the mainstream private sector when representatives of the small business sector put in an appearance at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre on Monday to further make a case for far greater attention to be paid to their growth needs in order to better position them to, among other things, benefit from some of the promised spinoffs from the oil & gas sector and to otherwise consolidate their operations.