–highlights trade imbalance, opportunities for regional integration

Regional integration has garnered significant attention in the Caribbean region. In light of Guyana’s upward trajectory, President Dr. Irfaan Ali has underscored the importance of examining how the region can be merged with the nation’s development.

During his address to the St Lucian Parliament on Wednesday, he made these remarks. According to him: “Today, I want to highlight that our country, Guyana, as part of our region, is open for investment. We are experiencing tremendous opportunities, including double-digit growth rates. We recently achieved a growth rate of 40 per cent, nearly 60 per cent the previous year, and anticipate rates in the upper 20 per cent in the coming years.

Adding: “However, the question remains: how do we integrate the region into Guyana’s economic expansion? This is a conversation we are eager to have.”
“We are all too small to have different technology and different platforms operating in the region. We are going to get back to the same problem if we do not operate on a common platform,” the president firmly remarked.

Furthermore, President Ali used statistics and disclosed: “In the last ten years, when you look at our trade numbers, Guyana would have exported to St. Lucia commodities to the tune of USD$71 million, and interestingly, St. Lucia would have exported to Guyana, products to the tune USD$79 million,” he said while highlighting the trade imbalance.
He then went on to look at St. Lucia’s existing housing market, which, according to him, is an avenue for fostering collaboration.

“Let us say conservatively that you have a deficit in the housing market of 2,500 homes in the next three to five years; that is the immediate need, the medium need, and you use the conservative figure of US$30,000 for a low-income home, that is what we are building…You are looking at an export potential of US$75 million in the immediate and medium term from Guyana to St. Lucia,” he said while highlighting the export potential within this area.

The Guyanese Head-of-State then went on to firmly remark: “These are the opportunities, the real opportunities that exist in expanding the relationship and expanding the trade between Guyana and St. Lucia.”
Furthermore, Dr. Ali made sure to seize the opportunity to motivate policy-makers to embrace this movement and turn it into a tangible outcome.

TRANSFORMATION OF HUMAN RESOURCES
The Guyanese Head-of-State did not hesitate to tackle the subject of human transformation and its crucial role in fostering development.
“We also face the challenge of human transformation. Today, the world is moving apace, whether it is AI, robotics, digitisation. We are now catching up,” the president told the St. Lucian Parliamentarians.

Adding to this, Dr. Ali said that the transformation of human resources must address the rapidly changing global environment.
He related: “The human transformation and digitisation are linked to economic transformation if we are to broaden our economic base.”

Using Guyana’s current chairmanship of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) as a vehicle to address these issues, he further stated that there are vast opportunities within the region that must be taken advantage of.
President Ali cited nearshoring jobs as an illustrative example of how they can augment the skillset of the workforce and generate more lucrative employment prospects.

As a matter of fact, during November 2023, he made public Guyana’s strategy of preparing 2,000 individuals for nearshoring employment opportunities within the oil sector.
He mentioned that the government of Guyana will allocate $10 million towards a grant programme aimed at partnering with others to train individuals for nearshoring positions.

To provide context, nearshoring involves the relocation of production from foreign countries to neighboring ones with a similar market, language, or time zone.
“We have to adapt to the changing environment,” President Ali told the St Lucian Parliamentarians.

COLLOBARATION
Guyana is at the forefront of CARICOM’s goal of achieving ‘Vision 25 by 2025,’ and the country’s leader emphasised the crucial role of the agriculture sector in this endeavour.
Putting things into perspective, the president stated that St. Lucia’s food import bill stands at an average of maybe 2,345 metric tonnes.

President Ali discussed how Guyana is expanding its agriculture sector through technology, research, and innovation while assisting its CARICOM counterpart in finding a local solution to reduce the high food import bill.
“We said we want 35 per cent of all the new agro-businesses to be owned by women and young people,” Dr Ali said while explaining that this allows the “rethinking” of the agriculture sector.

For context, the ‘25 by 25’ initiative is a pledge by the Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to reduce the region’s food import bill by at least 25 per cent by 2025.
Research has shown that the region imports, from out of the region, approximately 80 per cent of the food that it consumes, which amounts to approximately US$4 billion.

Despite the longstanding calls for increased domestic food production to tackle the high food import costs, the proposal gained renewed momentum among the governments in the region last year. This was prompted by the severe food insecurity that arose from the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, which showcased some of the worst consequences.

The conflict worsened the already existing food security issues during the COVID-19 outbreak. Guyana is widely regarded as a prominent country in the region, capable of boosting regional production and filling crucial gaps.
The government in Guyana has been dedicating considerable resources, such as land and funds, to support this initiative.

“We are now working to link Northern Brazil to Guyana,” the President shared while also stating that the nations must start thinking about how they can craft St Lucia into a distribution hub in the creation of Guyana’s regional food hub.
“That is the type of model we have to build. That is the type of co-investment that the private sector must make, that is the type of joint operation that the government of St Lucia and the Government of Guyana is committed to…” Dr Ali said.