SKEPTICS, particularly those innately opposed to the Government, usually scoff at any report that says Guyana has done well.
At a media briefing in July, on the eve of the launch of the UNDP's 2003 Human Development Report, some reporters questioned Guyana's new position, from 103 last year to 92 this year, with such passion that one UNDP official said afterwards that the reporters were "actually accusing" the UNDP of falsifying the figures to let the Government look good.
From those reporters' perspective, Guyana couldn't have done that well, not under the PPP/C administration, when the dreams of so many Guyanese remained unfulfilled.
Surely it could not have escaped the grasp of the UNDP that Guyana's 92nd position in the UN Human Development Report was attributable to the Government's policies and programmes on education delivery, poverty alleviation, gender equality, social services access, and improved governance and governmental transparency. Surely, thousands of Guyanese benefited from those policies and programmes!
Yet, as logic goes, skepticism will also greet Guyana's upward movement in UNCTAD's (the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) 2003 World Investment Report. To have placed 17th from 58th in 1990 isn't the kind of news about their country that critics of Government's investment policy want to hear.
Their theme has long been that the Government hasn't lured more than a trickle of foreign investments since assuming office, and that it doesn't have an aggressive foreign investments policy that is capable of attracting big investment inflows.
Those arguments may sound good in the absence of comparable figures showing otherwise.
But in whatever context skeptics place UNCTAD's 2003 World Investment Report, negative rhetoric isn't going to be able to detract from UNCTAD's comparative figures - certification that Guyana benefited from US$215 million in foreign direct investments between 1999 and 2002, or that Guyana averaged USS$33 million per year in direct foreign investments from 1991 to 1996.
In a world where aid flows and foreign investments are dwindling, that news and the fact that Guyana is only one of five countries in Latin America and the Caribbean among the world's 44 frontrunners for direct foreign investments are big pluses for us Guyanese.
Still, as GO-INVEST head Geoff DaSilva wisely cautioned at the launch of the World Investment Report on Friday, we are far from a position that affords us lulling into a sense of complacency.
The world isn't a gentler, kinder place since the Second Committee of the 57th General Assembly met last year.
The committee saw the global trade system keeping developing countries from being "equal players in the competitive trade game." In fact, the economies of emerging societies, Guyana included, "had been weakened by discriminatory international trading policies that kept commodity prices low and excluded their two most competitive economic sectors - agriculture and textiles - from the fair trade discipline of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)."
Not only has that situation remained the same. Last month's WTO meeting in Cancun, Mexico, didn't help matters.
Mr. DaSilva and our other policymakers will therefore continue to face the challenging task of attracting investments that help Guyana penetrate and retain its place in the world's highly competitive markets.