Three Guianas taking second steps to walk and work together

THREE neighbouring continental South American nations and territories, also washed by the Caribbean Sea, are preparing for the second round of a new initiative to enhance co-operation and collaboration among them, in a joint market of 216 million people, across a border-to-border landmass of almost 3.5 million square miles.

They have been examining new possibilities of co-operating in energy and developing non-oil sectors, especially agriculture and natural resources in their vast interiors, including diamonds and gold, bauxite and manganese – and endless timber.

Bounded by rivers and roads, the three former European colonies also share common history, but institutional co-operation has been hampered by historical distances created during the competitive era between slavery and colonialism, including very limited interaction between citizens and colonial governments.

Oil & Gas business always transcends geographic boundaries and, in these three cases, they assemble at the highest levels to plan how to continue doing business across language and other barriers that have never hindered business.

The Guyana Basins Summit (GBS) & Exhibition, hosted by Guyana, is described by organisers as “a platform of choice for oil and gas executives, government stakeholders and industry experts in Guyana.”
The first edition, under the theme “Driving Investment, Growth & Prosperity across the Guyana-Suriname Basin,” was hosted online on March 18, 2021, with the three neighbouring oil & gas powerhouses – one already established and two emerging — discussing how to work together to attract and share investments to the world’s new investment frontier, with two of the fastest-growing CARICOM economies and the wider region’s largest, by then assuring the rest of the world they were open for business.

But the second GBS & Exhibition will be hosted this year as a physical event at the now-open Pegasus Suites & Corporate Centre from October 4 to 6.
Under the theme of “Responsibly Developing the Region’s Resources for a Prosperous and Sustainable Future,” the 2022 summit will provide platforms for government, major operators, licence holders, tier-one contractors, service companies and the entire value chain in Guyana’s emerging hydrocarbons sector.,

Hosted across three days, the event will also offer a strategic summit during the three days, with four exhibition halls and two seminar theatres inside the trade exhibition, where the organisers say they expect over 100 exhibitors and as many speakers, over 500 delegates and some 3,000 trade visitors.

According to the planners’ website: “The strategic summit offers a wealth of content for strategically minded companies looking to capitalise on investment, development and project opportunities in one of the world’s Oil & Gas hotspots.”

The summit and exhibition, through seminar theatres, will also offer “the perfect platform for internationals to meet with local partners, buyers to meet with suppliers and dedicated areas to present project, product and technical expertise.”

Brazil is a member of the powerful BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group that represents the most people on planet Earth, with an equal-sized market for the Guianas.
Suriname holds the chairmanship of CARICOM currently and Guyana is leading the region’s quest to ensure Agriculture develops to serve Regional Food Security first and foremost, while also helping to reduce the region’s sky-high Food Import bill.

The upcoming Guianas summit will allow the participating nations, sharing resources and markets that continue to attract the interests of related big players globally, are also building their technical and human resource capacities at multilateral and bilateral levels, while building their own individual bases, to meet and keep with the new and vast changes in CARICOM’s two largest territories by land mass and South America’s biggest by both population and geography.

Together, the three countries have a market of over 216 million for products and services, trade exchanges and other forms of necessary neighbourly co-operation, and their combined natural resources outdo all other trilateral trade groups in South America and the Caribbean.

The challenges are many, but the opportunities are more and it’s now left to the oil & gas trio to deepen their areas of co-operation as they inch closer to better levels of neighbourly co-operation and mutual understanding at their second summit and expo, including examining how this mega alliance can and will serve the rest of the CARICOM region as it strives to reduce its food-import bill and enhance food security while searching for and finding new solutions for old problems no longer as insurmountable or unapproachable as before.

Guyana continues to prepare for the many streams of co-operative development that come from what was said by Senior Minister for Finance in the Office of the President, Dr Ashni Singh, at last year’s inaugural summit.
Dr. Singh said his country’s participation is guided by the government’s recognition of “the importance of strong, sustainable, broad-based real economic growth, driven not only by the oil sector but also by a strong non-oil economy including agriculture, agro-processing and food production, given our vast capacity for large-scale agriculture, tourism and hospitality, the remarkable endowment of nature in the Amazon rainforest, flora, fauna, spectacular rivers, waterfalls, logistics and our strategic location with overland access to both Brazil and Suriname — and close connections with the rest of the Caribbean.”

He also correctly noted: “Guyana’s strategic location, with advantageous links to Brazil and Suriname and the Caribbean” and that Guyanese investors would have “easy access to a market space much larger than the domestic Guyanese market,” which would also be accessible to other CARICOM member states.

To this end, all of CARICOM has an interest, one way or another, in next month’s Guyana’s Summit and Exhibition and Guyana and Suriname’s 12 fellow member states — all of which also have ties with Brazil — will be looking forward to sharing the fruits of the beneficial businesses waiting to be planted, nurtured and grown across rivers and mountains, seas and skies, between the three neighbouring Caribbean and South American nations, in this potentially fruitful and lucrative trade and economic alliance between close neighbours and willing partners.

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