GO INVEST - Going after investments
Guyana Chronicle
June 17, 2004
ANOTHER showcasing of Guyana is set for overseas over the next three days, this time in Toronto, Canada.
Starting tomorrow, the Guyanese private sector will be exhibiting a wide range of the exportable goods and services that it has been producing, since reasserting its role as the engine of growth at the beginning of the 1990s.
And the Guyana Office for Investment, or GO-INVEST, the facilitator of the process with the Guyana Consulate in Toronto, will be there working closely with the participants in the third of five trade and investment expositions that GO-INVEST is organizing outside of Guyana this year.
By GO-INVEST's own account, the three-day show at Travelodge Hotel, Keele Street and Highway 401 won't be a one-sided affair. The objective, it says, is "to showcase all that is grown and manufactured in Guyana to wholesalers, distributors, agents and the general public and to reciprocate by hosting Canadian businesses to display their products and services in Georgetown, in the second half of 2004." That's GUYEXPO 2004, which takes place at Sophia Exhibition Center, suburban Georgetown, September 23 through 27.
The overarching goal is "to facilitate alliances, distributorships and investment in Guyana and Canada." The same principle applied to the first two overseas expositions in GO-INVEST's 2004 Calendar Year - Barbados from February 27 to 29 and Trinidad and Tobago June 3 to 6 - and it applies to those scheduled for Xiamen, China, September 8 to 11 and Havana, Cuba, October 31 to November 7.
At a time when critics are campaigning against the government at home and abroad, arguing that it doesn't have an investment policy and hasn't been able to attract any significant foreign investments since assuming office in October of 1992, GO-INVEST has come to symbolize the administration's response in a very big way.
GUYMIDA, the precursor of GO-INVEST, was established to promote manufacturing and agro-industry envisaged in the country's 1972-1976 National Development Plan. But as its last head, Clem Duncan, would later testify, GUYMIDA couldn't function in the environment in which Guyana found itself from 1972 to 1988.
"Overall," recall the authors of the National Development Strategy, "the performances of the public sector entities were nothing short of catastrophic. Mismanagement and political paramountcy literally brought surplus-generating operations into deficit positions, and they became for a number of years a continuous drain on an economy that was badly short of financial resources and which had to borrow externally in order to sustain public expenditure at minimal real levels.
By the time the former regime began liberalizing the economy in 1998, when the IMF and the World Bank finally managed to convince it to accept their Policy Framework Paper and implement the Economic Recovery Programme Policy, the economy had spiraled downwards below the level of Haiti's.
GO-INVEST was established in 1994 under the Public Corporation Act of that year, and has been working feverishly ever since to "contribute to Guyana's economic development by promoting and facilitating local and foreign private-sector investment and exports in accordance with the country's approved investment and export strategies."
True to its mission, GO-INVEST has played a very significant role in Guyana jumping 41 places in UNCTAD's world investment ratings for foreign direct investments.
Guyana was placed 17th out of 140 countries for the period 1999-2002 and was one of only five Latin American and Caribbean countries in the top 44 rated nations.
At a time when the government's opponents sharpening their criticisms of its handling of the economy and its ability to attract investments, GO-INVEST is continuing to lead the way in promoting the government's policy on foreign investments and maintain or improve its placement in UNCTAD's ratings.