ON Monday July 19, the Prime Minister of Kuwait, His Highness Sheikh Nasser Mohamed Al-Ahmed Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, arrived in Guyana on a one-day State visit while on a tour of Latin America and the Caribbean. He was accompanied by a 66-member high-level delegation.
At the Office of the President the two countries signed five bilateral agreements covering trade, air transport and cooperation in several other areas.
A contingent of Kuwaiti businessmen, who had by pre-arrangement also met with members of Guyana’s private sector to explore joint venture trade and investment initiatives and opportunities.
Like his mentor Dr. Jagan, President Bharrat Jagdeo has explored out of the box to revolutionise the development paradigm of the country and people whose leadership he inherited, then won.
Heads of states form strategic alliances to promote the causes and welfare of their people. That Guyana’s President has turned his sights to the Middle East is not surprising for a number of reasons, the primary one being the fact that the PPP/C administration has always viewed the world as one global village, where nation states are interdependent on each, one way or another, for subsistence, existence, and survival.
Dr. Cheddi Jagan has advocated the New Global Human Order, through which he lobbied for a new international dispensation that would entail the restructuring of the world’s socio-economic factors to be more equitable and just.
President Bharrat Jagdeo’s Agriculture Initiative and Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) are well-documented; and President Jagdeo was one of the first persons to advocate a restructuring of the modalities and policies of the Bretton Woods agencies to allow the economic survival of impoverished countries submerged in a welter of debt to funding agencies.
And both Presidents Jagdeo and Jagan believed in forging bridges and linkages that would prove beneficial to Guyana and the Guyanese people, so this alliance with Kuwait, while seen in negative contexts by the naysayers and doomsayers who proliferate in the country, is being viewed and approached with high expectations by the Administration.
Like Guyana, Kuwait also has a tumultuous past because, although rich in oil, the small country occupies an uneasy position at the head of the Gulf. But, like Guyanese, Kuwaitis are a resilient people, and they are once again a strong nation, with which Guyana has much in common, and which will join Guyana in shared development initiatives in the near future.
Information Officer in the Kuwaiti Prime Ministerial delegation, Misharwi, said that he can foresee great things to come from these agreements, because it is a short meeting that will achieve much.
Guyana’s President has also been building bridges – literally and figuratively, with its immediate neighbours.
The President has made it clear that Guyana was not looking for handouts, but investment and trading partnerships and during his visit last Wednesday to Venezuela that country’s President, Hugo Chavez has offered to supply all of Guyana’s fuel needs and restated a desire to build a pipeline across this country to Suriname.
President Bharrat Jagdeo, in turn, has signalled Guyana’s willingness to join the Venezuela-led Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of the Americas, (ALBA) as an observer and the two countries have also committed to a peaceful resolution of Caracas’ claims to Essequibo. During that visit four cooperation accords and one joint statement were signed. The agreements focused on agricultural, energy and fishery matters.
The Venezuelan President has said that Venezuela should share its oil wealth with its neighbours and strengthen regional unity. President Chavez told his Guyanese counterpart that Caracas is willing to increase oil shipments of 5,000 barrels a day to 10,000 barrels, which would satisfy Guyana’s fuel needs. Guyana receives Venezuelan oil under the Petrocaribe programme, which provides Chavez’s regional allies with oil on concessional payment terms in exchange for goods or services — not just cash. “This makes us feel more committed to South American integration,” Chavez was quoted as saying.
The bilateral agreements signed during President Jagdeo’s visit included a Letter of Commitment between the Venezuela’s Ministry of the People´s Power for Food and the Ministry of Agriculture; a Memorandum of Under-standing (MOU) between Venezuela’s People´s Ministry for Energy and Petroleum and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the supply of urea; another MOU between the two ministries for the supply of jet fuel and; a MOU between the two governments for the creation of a Committee for the Prevention, Investigation and Settlement of Fishing Incidents.
The Letter of Commitment could fructify in Venezuela purchasing 50,000 tonnes of paddy and 20,000 tonnes of white rice from Guyana, while the urea MOU will result in Venezuela supplying 4,000 tonnes of urea to Guyana. Venezuela will also explore opportunities of supplying Jet A1 fuel to Guyana and the possibility of triangulating such supply with third countries. The paddy and rice deal will primarily be financed by the barter arrangement under the Petrocaribe deal.
The two leaders have also tasked their respective Foreign Ministries to work on the convening of the Fifth High Level Bilateral Commission Meeting (COBAN) to be held in Caracas and they also proposed to execute the Feasibility Study and the Environmental Impact Study of the Venezuela-Guyana Road Link (Tumeremo to Georgetown), as an imperative prerequisite for development and integration between both countries, as well as explored other areas of joint venture/co-operation initiatives with other nations and organisations, because the two Presidents recognize the help that regional and sub-regional organizations can offer for the peaceful resolution of local controversies, and for preventive diplomacy.
Forging trade ties out of the box
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