Diversification, investments, food for all, public housing…

HOW GUYANA HAS OVERTAKEN T&T

ECONOMIC diversification, foreign investments, food for all, support for poor people, housing projects.

A reduction in red tape, more activities in mining and fisheries, and better health care.

These are among the big-ticket human development items the Government of Guyana is pursuing as it presides over the fastest-growing economy in the world.

The economy is expected to expand by a mind-boggling 60 per cent during the current fiscal year, according to the International Monetary Fund.

“We are thinking big,” President Dr. Irfaan Ali has said, adding that “there is a clear strategy” and “careful and calculated work” is being done.

To be sure, some are mere plans while others are in various stages of development and execution.

For example, Guyana is spending some of its energy bounty on boosting forestry, agriculture, quarrying, bauxite, infrastructure, schools, healthcare, and more.

The Government is determined not to catch the Dutch Disease, where rapid development in one sector leads to sharp declines in other industries.

Like what took place in Trinidad and Tobago.

The ruling regime is setting its sights on Qatar and Kuwait – not T&T, where there are still no efforts at economic diversification.

Plans to construct a 30,000 barrels-per-day oil refinery in Guyana cannot be good news for the Petrotrin refinery, which is rusting four and a half years after being mothballed.

Even with its local content policy, Guyana is still wooing investors from around the world, to an annual value of US $5 billion, according to the American State Department.

T&T has slumped from an average of US $1.5 billion in annual investments in 2015 to a flight of business worth US $450 million last year, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has said.

Procurement legislation remains weak in T&T, while the Guyanese boast of transparency in the midst of “enormous investment opportunities.”

The Guyanese president tells of plans to feed his nation within the next few years and to become “a global leader in food services.”

With much of its former sugar lands now occupied by franchise businesses and shopping malls, T&T brings in $6 billion worth of food each year and is easily impacted by imported inflation and shortages.

The cost of food in T&T is steadily increasing while agriculture remains a bad word for the authorities.

The Guyanese authorities are investing heavily in public housing, while there is a backlog of 250,000 applicants in T&T and many live in unfit conditions.

More social welfare support is going out to the vulnerable and small business opportunities are being created next door.

In T&T, however, one-third of the population is poor and the middle class is vanishing.

Information technology is being modernised in Guyana, while T&T is still to digitise its public service.

Motorists line up for hours for routine licensing services because appropriate systems are still to be implemented.

There is a massive Guyanese thrust on constructing schools, health centres, roads, bridges, tourism projects, ports, etc.

In T&T, no schools are being built, but $131 million has been spent on upgrading Skinner Park even though there is an under-utilised stadium fewer than five miles away.

T&T’s roads belie the fact that we are an energy economy.

Guyanese human capacity is being strengthened for domestic and international jobs.

“Highly skilled workers,” the president says, “to compete globally.”

Admittedly, a lot of Guyana’s economic progress is uneven, but these are still early salad days.

International agencies are impressed, with the Organisation of American States happy about plans to reduce poverty and the World Bank has hailed the management of the economy and improvements in education.

How does this dramatic economic makeover of Guyana contrast with T&T?

Calypso poet Black Stalin captured it best:

“Oil money come and oil money go/And people remain in the pavement and ghetto.”