Beyond the Jubilee…

WHEN President, Dr. Irfaan Ali visited the UK in April for a Guyana Investment Conference and addressed the Caribbean Council’s House of Lords Reception, the Ukraine War was just two months old and the effects had not yet quite started to affect global food and energy costs like today.

But by then, Guyana was already Britain’s biggest Caribbean trading partner, trade between them in 2021 amounting to 516 million pounds (sterling) and accounting for 21.6% of all UK trade with the Caribbean.

In 2011, total trade was 94 million pounds and trade has thus expanded six times in the last 10 years (or 600% in the past decade).

A visit to Guyana by a Department for International Trade (DIT) delegation last year and a nine-member British delegation of business executives and a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) and the Caribbean Council have been cited as having contributed to the better trade figures.

So lively is Guyana-UK trade today that the British High Commission in Georgetown is also looking to explore the opportunity of establishing a British Chamber of Commerce in Guyana.

President Ali addressed a packed House of Lords audience back in April – and according to High Commissioner Jane Miller, “the message was that Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean are open for business.”

She further noted that “as a result of this visit” – and particularly President Ali’s meeting with Prime Minister Johnson – “they’re now developing a more formal framework that will enable a deeper relationship including for future commercial engagement.”

All that was before Day 100 of the Ukraine War earlier this month, but before and since The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee holiday a fortnight ago, Britain and the USA had both been facing the accumulated political, social and economic costs of 40-year inflation highs and unprecedented increases in fuel costs at the pump.

With Britain approaching two pounds per gallon and US prices at $5 per gallon in some states last weekend, the British Pound depreciating by 7% against the US Dollar and the UK economy contracted twice in two months (April and May), PM Johnson would still emerge with a 60%-40% victory in the No Confidence Motion last week to deal the Opposition Labour Party’s Leader Sir Keith Starmer a double-whammy, a UK poll revealing Johnson had more support as Prime Minister than his main opponent.

In the middle of June 2022, current global events and recent happenings in the UK and Guyana have collided to make it even more necessary (and possible) for the Guyana President and the UK Prime Minister to be “developing a more formal framework that will enable a deeper relationship including for future commercial engagement…”

Recent reports indicate Guyana has in the past seven years emerged as a leading global drilling destination after ExxonMobil made 32 discoveries in the offshore Stabroek Block.

The U.S Geological Survey had predicted, in May 2001, that the Guyana-Suriname Basin held somewhere between 2.8 billion and 32.6 billion barrels of undiscovered oil resources, but one year later there’s near-certainty the volume is far greater.

Indeed, the Guyana-Suriname basin had overtaken Brazil as South America’s leading exploration hotspot, again credited mostly to ExxonMobil’s 2015 Stabroek Block having delivered more than 13 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe), about 10 times the volumes found in Brazil during the same period.

President Ali and PM Johnson talked briefly about the former ‘West Indian colonies’ in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) call for Britain to apologise and pay Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide, but it goes without saying that most of their exchange had to do with bilateral trade in the new dispensation, where Guyana continues to have what Britain needs most — in this case an ability to talk about reliable Oil & Gas deliveries at a time when Britain and Europe are finding it painful to scramble for new sources of the vital resource.

Unlike Slavery and Colonialism when British Guiana’s resources were the property of the British Crown and planters and merchants across the Caribbean and the rest of the British Empire, the Republic of Guyana today can sit across the table and negotiate on an equal basis as owner of all its natural resources — and just as capable of forging new relationships with Britain to fit today’s new and very-changed times.

The President and the Prime Minister are both in their mid-terms and both countries are beset by the global post-Ukraine food and energy problems, even though their respective futures look very different in terms of access to domestic resources to address the worsening crises.

Trade has multiplied, as Britain has essentially seen and accepted Guyana’s present and future role as an even-more-important trading partner with more resources and resource-extraction capacity today than ever before.

The qualitative and quantitative changes in global trade and the new and necessary alliances to be formed between the nations of the world also allow developing nations with negotiating capacity to insist on new approaches that will be more to mutual benefit than one-sided, with no imbalances dictated by traditional patterns of appropriating unjust shares of capital returns from investments in and/or purchasing of resources.

The President and the Prime Minister and their respective governments have within reach the possibility of further redrawing and redefining bilateral trade between the UK and Guyana and the wider Caribbean, for the better — and for the benefit of all.

Whether and how fast the two sides grasp that challenge and the opportunities it brings will be determined in the weeks and months ahead as the world continues to adjust to the continuing and deepening effects of the Ukraine War, Climate Change and Supply Chain crises.

One sure thing, though, as the British High Commissioner noted, London is very much aware that “Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean are open for business.”