Editorial

Since the Auditor General is the auditing czar for all ministries, departments and regions, what he has to say in his annual report should be followed as closely by citizens as Greenspan’s words of wisdom were by Wall Street.

Nobody expects the PPP when talking among themselves to be open-minded and imaginative, let alone to delineate a vision for the future which soars above the present grubby realities, but did their senior spokesmen really have to address the party cohorts in quite such tawdry and misconceived terms last weekend?

How will we remember China’s first time as host of the Olympics?

The eventual completion – albeit after a few extended deadlines – of Republic Bank’s new and imposing edifice at the corner of Camp and Robb streets brings to an end a protracted period of traffic congestion,  and inconvenience to pedestrians.

Addressing the opening session of the second meeting between the Caricom Secretary-General and the Heads of Regional Institutions at the Caricom Secretariat, a week ago on Wednesday, Secretary-General Edwin Carrington, stressed that “integration is not for the faint of heart.”

The significance of the decision to recognise ‘security’ as the fourth pillar of the Caribbean Community, taken by Caricom Heads of Government at their inter-sessional meeting in St Vincent and The Grenadines in February last year,  seems still not to have been fully recognised in this insecure country.

The Doha talks have ended, not unexpectedly without a successful conclusion.

Citizens of Canada, the UK or the USA who plan to pay a visit to Guyana soon can do themselves a favour by reading the travel advisories posted by the Georgetown diplomatic missions of their countries of origin.

A recent visit by a Stabroek News reporter to Arau near to the border with Venezuela presented a disturbing picture of the mining damage that is being done in this isolated community mainly inhabited by Amerinidians.

Last week there was no shortage of bad news about infrastructure.

Come September 2, representatives of donors and the developing countries they assist – governments as well as civil society – will meet in Accra, Ghana, to review decisions made in Paris, France in 2005 on the way aid should be delivered and managed.

The minds of many in the region are being exercised by the growing economic importance of Petrocaribe and the apparent appeal of President Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA).

After seven years of analysis and fine-tuning, nine quarrelsome days was all it took for the main actors at the World Trade Organisation’s Doha talks to realise that they couldn’t, after all, make a deal.

Simultaneously with the European Union’s effort to reorganize its economic relationships with the African, Caribbean and Pacific states, the EU is involved in a major effort of seeking to effectively influence the reorganization of the contours of the global economy taking place in the Doha Development Round talks.

Minister of Home Affairs Mr Clement Rohee seems to have reached a fork in the road.

As we all know tomorrow’s seminar by the Privatisation Unit was summoned at the behest of President Jagdeo to educate business leaders and others on the tax laws as they relate to concessions.

The anglophone Caribbean nations are finally doing what the late Trinidadian Prime Minister Eric Williams foresaw all those decades ago: they are making themselves client states of Venezuela.

Current world trends indicate that, at least in the short to medium term, unemployment levels will continue to rise.

In his most recent ‘The view from Europe,’ David Jessop, one of the more astute external observers of regional affairs, pulls no punches in stating the growing view that a “dysfunctional regional integration process” now prevails in Caricom.

A few days ago Stabroek Business interviewed the Country Representative of the Inter-American Insti-tute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) Ignatius Jean about the work of IICA in Guyana and about the role of the organization in supporting the current regional response to the global food crisis.