Business

Where environmental concerns that impinge on the safety and health of the citizens are concerned, we in Guyana have lived pretty much ‘on the edge,’ so to speak.

With no short-term end to the long-standing problem of limited access to affordable financing to support the development of the country’s construction and engineering sub-sector in sight, the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) says it wants “a comprehensive overhaul” of the country’s financial system on the back of the emergence of an oil and gas economy that will bring with it a Development Bank that will help to overcome what it describes as “this key challenge” facing manufacturers.

Planning is underway for the staging by the Small Business Bureau (SBB) of a Client Expo at D’Urban Park later this year, as the state-run agency responsible for providing technical and financial support for local small and micro enterprises seeks to draw greater public attention to the underexploited potential in the small business sector and particularly in the agro-processing sub-sector.

Even as optimism abounds that Local Content can serve as “a key tool to help developing countries to reap, in a sustainable manner, the economic and social benefits from their natural resources” there exists a deep-rooted concern that if not implemented and managed carefully and if not subjected to  public scrutiny, Local Content can offer “significant corruption opportunities,” according to an article published in the 2019 issue of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) Souvenir Magazine.

By Lance Hinds Since the late 1990s Caribbean governments and stakeholders have in principle, recognised and articulated that a highly functioning Information Society was critical to the long-term development of the region and its citizens. 

Just weeks after an article in the 2018 Annual Report of the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) voiced a thinly veiled criticism of the lending policy of local commercial banks, describing their interest rates as “notoriously high,” a Jamaican-born global economic expert, David Marston, appears to be making a similar case to the effect that lenders and financiers in the sister CARICOM country are “too narrowly focused on the types of assets they are willing to back,” according to a report in the Jamaica Gleaner.

It would seem that Guyana is not the only country in the region that has issues with used tyres, even though in one other CARICOM country a company is seeking to respond to the problem by turning its piles of tyres into something useful…cement.

We may have come a long way from the days of the old American ‘west’ when bank robberies were committed by bands of brigands ‘toting’ guns and barking orders to terrified tellers to ‘open the safe’ and making off with bags of money.

The prevalence of overweight school-age children, including children in the Caribbean, arising out of ill-advised food consumption habits and less than adequate exercise regimes could be one of the major health challenges looming on the global horizon according to UNICEF’s recently released report on The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World.

In its own modest way, the Guyana School of Agriculture (GSA) continues to make a noteworthy contribution to one of the most eye-catching developments in the country’s business sector in recent years, and that is, the aggressive emergence of a new and determined generation of entrepreneurial aspirants in the country’s agro- processing sector.

*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.

Kitco Market Data Gold Prices for the three day period ending Thursday July 25, 2019

Stock market updates

When former Minister of Business Dominic Gaskin announced late last year that the 20 per cent ‘set aside’ provision that would allow small businesses to secure access to various types of state contracts worth up to $30 million would come on stream from January this year, the announcement, it seemed at the time, had come more out of a sense of unbridled optimism than against the background of any real certainty that that deadline could actually be met.

Guyana’s learning curve in the oil and gas sector is unlikely to be littered exclusively with pleasing revelations all of which have to do with the positive transformational effect that the industry promises to have on the welfare of the populace and the development of the country as a whole.

Very much with the 2017 10th place outcome for the Guyana team in the first ever Global Robotics Competition, the local STEM Guyana organization has announced that it is in the process of preparing two teams to participate in junior and senior international Robotics competitions in Dubai and South Korea later this year.

When 20-year-old Asha Christian tests and launches her mobile hair app, named Coily, here in Guyana on July 27th, 2019, that would not be her first venture of the kind.  

If you think that the mango ranks at the very top of the list of the world’s most revered fruits then the available evidence suggests that you have a pretty strong case for so believing.