Business

Caribbean Business Report Despite making progress in its economic reform programme, Barbados still faces “severely depressed” conditions, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

It hasn’t taken too long since the announcement some weeks ago by the Cuban government of reforms that would allow small- and medium-sized ventures to formally incorporate as businesses and access state financing.

With several countries in the region still lagging behind current global thinking on the importance of radically adjusting their approaches to the packaging and labelling of food products the Caricom Private Sector Organization (CPSO), an Associate Institution of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is beginning to extoll the virtues of the region embracing Front of Package Nutrition Labels (FOP), a product labeling format that provides key health and nutritional information, relating to, among other things, the fat, sugar, salt, or calorie content of foods, clearly, on the front of food packaging.

By Arthur Deakin In a recent offshore oil & gas conference in Houston, Texas, in the US, Guyana’s foreign minister said that the country’s economy is expected to grow 500 per cent by 2030.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage the global community with no hard immediate-term evidence of a respite in sight, a mid-August World Bank report says that an increasing number of countries across the globe are facing growing levels of acute food insecurity which carries with it the threat of a likely reversal of several years of development gains.

Kitco Market Data Gold Prices for the three day period ending Thursday September 2, 2021

For now at least, we must accept as made public, information provided by Chief Executive Officer of the Guyana Office for Investment (G-Invest) Dr Peter Ramsaroop and reported by the Department of Public Information (DPI) not just that “the government has held talks with members of the diaspora in Texas and Florida, USA on the roles they could play in Guyana’s development” but also that “many overseas-based Guyanese have expressed a desire to return home.”

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 930’s trading results showed consideration of $8,732,550 from 18,537 shares traded in 18 transactions as compared to session 929’s trading results which showed consideration of $20,768,855 from 44,243 shares traded in 10 transactions.

Having earlier this year found a new oil supplier in Guyana, to help ease its huge productive sector of the jitters associated with the prevailing policies of an increasingly idiosyncratic Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), India’s oil demand travails persist in the face of a continuing decline in its own domestic production for the second consecutive month at the end of July.

One of the more enlightening sights that attended the programme of events held to mark the thirtieth year since the establishment  of The Gift Centre, was that of the company’s 71-year-old founder, Doris Lewis, who she assured us, had briefly ‘slipped out of retirement’ to place her own personal imprimatur on the commemorative programme.

Last weekend’s EXPO 50 event at the Giftland Mall organised by fashion designer, Sonia Noel, to mark her 50th birthday served as a pointed reminder that Guyana is bursting at the seams with women of entrepreneurial vision who are still to attract the market attention that they deserve.

Soursop is commonly found in South America and the Caribbean and is one of Guyana’s most highly prized fruits.

Increasingly, the local female skin care and body beauty market is beginning to pay a greater measure of attention to the fast-emerging options to the high-priced imported products that have saturated the local (and Caribbean) market and which, not only on account of cost, have become unreachable to working women.

Even as the threat of outbreaks of new strains of the COVID-19 virus surface with increasing regularity, the issues of testing and being vaccinated have increasingly become matters of public controversy in parts of the region.

Thirty four year old Tracy Payne is part of an emerging contingent of young whose excursions into one business pursuit or another are beginning to make a persuasive statement about the emergence of a new generation of Guyanese businesswomen.

There had always been a certain inevitability to the recent Global Alert issued by INTERPOL in the matter of the means by which countries acquire adequate supplies of the COVID-19 vaccines.

                                         Kitco Market Data Gold Prices for the three day period ending Thursday August 26, 2021