Business

                                       Kitco Market Data Gold Prices for the three day period ending Thursday September 3, 2020

*Prices only represent the average Wholesale Farmgate and Retail Prices at the above mentioned markets and are NOT prices set by the Guyana Marketing Corporation or Ministry of Agriculture.

Perhaps surprisingly, the UN Secretary General’s Policy Brief titled “Education During COVID-19 and   Beyond” released at the beginning of August and which examines the challenge of restoring education systems, globally, and even seeking to render education delivery more robust, more efficient, in the post COVID-19 era, has not benefitted from a great deal of traction in the media here.

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 878’s trading results showed consideration of $39,746,085 from 119,446 shares traded in 12 transactions as compared to session 877’s trading results which showed consideration of $17,182,518 from 189,394 shares traded in 13 transactions.

A post-Covid-19 Guyana business community is likely to find itself significantly denuded of many of those micro and small business enterprises which, prior to the outbreak of the virus, had added a new and enterprising dimension to the overall business sector whilst contributing significantly to job-creation and enhancing individual and family incomes.

Not even the untimely advent of COVID-19 has altered external perception of Guyana as currently the choice Caribbean destination in which to do business, the tantrums of the virus having failed to extinguish the prevailing high hopes for the growth of the country’s economy on the back an emerging oil industry.

Our efforts to track the fortunes of micro and small businesses in the COVID-19 environment between May and August have led us to the discovery that small businesses run by women and young business persons are being hit hardest by the fallout from the pandemic.

If ever there remained any lingering doubts about the tourism-dependent nature of the global economy those were, this week, completely erased by the stunning revelation from United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres that the coronavirus pandemic had cost the global industry a staggering US$320 billion in exports between January and May this year and continues to put in excess of 120 million jobs at prolonged risk.

Can local micro, small businesses survive the covid-19 onslaught The overwhelming majority of our reportage since March this year has focused on the advent of the coronavirus and the ways in which it has impacted on business as a whole in Guyana.

It is not too early, we believe, for the Stabroek Business to restate its position that there is everything to be gained from removing the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC) from within the ambit of the Ministry of Agriculture and allowing it to function as a semi-autonomous state entity under a management structure that is far more suitable to enhancing its role as an agency responsible for providing critical services to the private sector.

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 877’s trading results showed consideration of $17,182,518 from 189,394 shares traded in 13 transactions as compared to session 876’s trading results which showed consideration of $11,902,369 from 109,663 shares traded in 27 transactions.

Gold Prices for the three day period ending Thursday August 27, 2020

Could current events in the oil and gas sector in the hemisphere portend a radical change in the pecking order insofar as oil production is concerned?

As COVID-19-related illness and death rates mount globally against the backdrop of an increasingly desperate search for a cure, the United Nations is reporting that the illegal trade in fake or faulty products associated with either treating or fending off the virus is booming.

Natasha David is one of possibly thousands of Guyanese women whose modest entrepreneurial pursuits have been derailed by the gale force winds of the Coronavirus, leaving their lives and their livelihoods in limbo.

While it is clear that hundreds of micro and small businesses across the country and seriously up against it insofar as surviving the serious decline in economic activity occasioned by the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, amongst those that the Stabroek Business has engaged, many are demonstrating an astonishing will to keep going.

                                                 Kitco Market Gold Prices for the three day period ending Thursday August 13th, 2020